enter a phantasmagoria

The Last Word

2008-02-14T19:21:00.000-08:00

Picture 1.
Picture 2

The last word: "To sail without ever landing doesn't have a landing-place. To never arrive implies never arriving ever."- Fernando Pessoa

Sometimes you find the right cocktail that says the right feeling of a moment. The Last Word: tart with lime, bitter with herbal complexity, all in a perfect gin hit. The last word is the word that lingers longest, whether intended or not.

a weird phrase from a notebook: " I am Jack's pulsating medulla oblongota, releasing self-regulated rage in bite-sized, consumable doses; packaged colorfully, as not to upset the viewer." (Did I write this?)

The last word, you want to leave with something witty but deep, a sort of esprit d'escalier; but instead you end up sounding petulant and whiny. Sour words in the wake and then there are those who always end up leaving literary.

The Last Word: from the Cocktailian:

Makes 1 drink

3/4 ounce dry gin
3/4 ounce maraschino liqueur
3/4 ounce green Chartreuse
3/4 ounce fresh lime juice

Instructions: Fill a cocktail shaker two-thirds full of ice and add all of the ingredients. Shake for approximately 15 seconds and strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

For Another Valentine's Day gone by.

322

2008-02-11T18:52:00.001-08:00

Pictures of Oakland.

"Every gesture, however simple, violates an inner secret. Every gesture is a revolutionary act; an exile, perhaps, from the truth of our intentions.

Action is a disease of thought, a cancer of the imagination. Action is self-exile. Every action is incomplete and flawed. The poem I dream has no flaws until I try to realize it. " -Fernando Pessoa

hypnopompic

2008-02-07T14:11:00.001-08:00

picture 1: Color photos from WWI-http://www.worldwaronecolorphotos.com/
picture 2: Cafe in Vienna, 1971

It was the Austrian sketch-writer and habitué of Vienna's Café Central, Alfred Polgar, who perhaps best captured the essence of the literary café when he described it as "a place where people want to be alone, but need company to do so". Since the first European coffee house opened in Venice in 1645, artists and writers have adopted cafés as their unofficial workplaces - libraries in which they can eat, drink, smoke and gossip at the same time as working on the latest draft and sharing ideas.

Today, the decline of a true café society is to be mourned. One can hardly imagine Alfred Jarry's (author of Ubu Roi) pick-up line working in Starbucks. Spotting a pretty girl from his vantage point at the bar in Paris's La Closerie des Lilas, he approached her table, fired a shot into the mirror behind her with his gun and said suavely, "Maintenant que la glace est rompue, causons." ("Now the ice is broken, let's talk.") link

........................

The Muslims came to Europe, he writes, as “the forward wave of civilization that was, by comparison with that of its enemies, an organic marvel of coordinated kingdoms, cultures, and technologies in service of a politico-cultural agenda incomparably superior” to that of the primitive people they encountered there. They did Europe a favor by invading. This is not a new idea, but Lewis takes it further: he clearly regrets that the Arabs did not go on to conquer the rest of Europe. The halting of their advance was instrumental, he writes, in creating “an economically retarded, balkanized, and fratricidal Europe that . . . made virtues out of hereditary aristocracy, persecutory religious intolerance, cultural particularism, and perpetual war.” It was “one of the most significant losses in world history and certainly the most consequential since the fall of the Roman Empire.” link

Peter Altenberg

2008-01-30T19:33:00.001-08:00

Pictures form this site.

"I never, never, never should feel a woman, unless I want to feel her. My name is Altenberg after all, not Strindberg.”

“Even good books never stink, they are the distillation of all the malodorous sins one has committed of which one had finally managed to extract a drop of fragrant humanity!”

“I was nothing, I am nothing, I will be nothing. But I will live out my life in freedom and let noble and considerate souls share in the experiences of this free inner life, by putting them out in the most concentrated form on paper.” -from Telegrams of the Soul

From Wiki:

Peter Altenberg (March 9, 1859 - January 8, 1919) was a writer and poet from Vienna, Austria. He was key to the genesis of early modernism in the city.

Although he grew up in a middle class Jewish family, Altenberg eventually separated himself from his family of origin by dropping out of both law and medical school, and embracing Bohemianism as a permanent lifestyle choice. He cultivated a feminine appearance and feminine handwriting, wore a cape, sandals and a broad-brimmed hat, and despised 'macho' masculinity.

At the fin de siècle, when Vienna was a major crucible and center for modern arts and culture, Altenberg was a very influential part of a literary and artistic movement known as Jung Wien or "Young Vienna." Altenberg was a contemporary of Karl Kraus, Gustav Mahler, Arthur Schnitzler, Gustav Klimt, and Adolf Loos, with whom he had a very close relationship. He was somewhat older, in his early 30s, than the others. In addition to being a poet and prolific letter writer, he was an accomplished short story writer, prose writer, and essayist.

anecdotal envelope

2008-01-28T20:13:00.001-08:00

Photo 1: Lina Scheynius
Photo 2: Kirigami

from the notebook, December 2005:

RE: Remy de Gourmont “…confided to his personal diary his intention to devote himself to ‘l’amour et les livres,’ scrupulously noting that love would enable him to develop the sensual aspect of his personality, and books the intellectual aspect.”

“…where all the dear little adulteresses, eternally beloved, were endlessly enraptured by the impatient and imperious caresses of the angels of perversity.”

“…you will have no dream but the dream of dreaming.”

12/10/05-Random unknown note:
at times I looked at that immense solitude before me, and that other solitude that was becoming more terrible.

Tracery of harmony

12/12/05-Embers whitened by the pale reflection of the seething sun.

One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World

2008-01-25T15:00:00.001-08:00

When I read the above headline, I knew it referred to me: I am a grump, although a well-read grump. The first picture is taken from a slideshow about Lee Miller in the 1/21/2008 issue of the New Yorker which accompanied a very interesting article but it is not available online. The second picture is Weldon Kees reading in San Francisco.

Little reads of the week:

The days get longer. It was a long time ago.
And I have come to that point in the turning of the path
Where peaks are infinite--horn-shaped and scaly, choked with

thorns.
But even here, I know our work was worth the cost.
What we have brought to pass, no one can take away.
Life offers up no miracles, unfortunately, and needs assistance.
Nothing will be the same as once it was,
I tell myself.--It's dark here on the peak, and keeps on getting
darker.
It seems I am experiencing a kind of ecstasy.
Was it sunlight on the waves that day? The night comes down.
And now the water seems remote, unreal, and perhaps it is.
-Weldon Kees A Distance From The Sea

By all accounts, Balenciaga -- severe, uncompromising, taciturn -- is couture's Soup Nazi. As his friend and Vogue's fashion editor, the high-born and high-minded Bettina Ballard, wrote, "His life is his work...It rarely seems to give him a sense of fulfillment, as it never reaches the perfection he desires. Balenciaga's art emerged from his sympathy with women. He knew, for instance, that he had three generations of women to dress, and so always had some older models. Ernestine Carter, fashion editor of The Times of London, was spot-on in her evocation of his favorite model and the muse for many of his early masterpieces, the notoriously unpleasant Colette (not the writer): "her Dracula walk, her big head low like a bull ready to charge, her shoulders hunched down,...and a look of almost violent hatred on her face." She wouldn't have fit in at the House of Dior, where woman was ornament, but she was extremely useful to Balenciaga's customers: "Any woman could wear Colette's clothes -- one of those tricks of proportion."

From the Persian Gulf to the Arctic Circle, Weiner discovers that happiness blooms where we least expect it. Who knew that the long, dark Icelandic winter gives rise to a magical, communal culture that has done away with envy and sobriety? Or that the Thais so prize "fun" that their government has created a Gross Domestic Happiness Index to ensure they get enough of it? Or that Moldovans are miserable because they "derive more pleasure from their neighbor's failure than their own success"? Or that the wealthy citizens of Qatar lead pampered, joyless lives in a "gilded sandbox" while the poor citizens of Bhutan are cheerfully obsessed with archery tournaments, penis statues and feeding marijuana to their fat (and presumably happy) pigs?

Anna Akhmatova

2008-01-19T22:39:00.001-08:00

I drink to the wreck of our life together
And the pain of living alone.
I drink to the loneliness we shared-
My dear, I drink to you.

I drink to the trick of a mouth that betrayed me,
To the eyes and the look that lied.
I drink to the terrible world we inhabit
And to god, who never replied.

- Anna Akhmatova trans. by Paul Schmidt
from a found New Yorker, November 6, 2006

Museums of Disasters, III

2008-01-15T17:01:00.000-08:00

Picture from here

Museum of failed products

Museum of extinct insects

Museum of Lost Wonder

icy Museum of pointless existence

Schmapp

2008-01-15T11:48:00.000-08:00

to the coast

2008-01-09T21:40:00.001-08:00

“I am lured away by faraway distances, the immense void I project upon the world. A feeling of emptiness grows in me; it infiltrates my body like light an impalpable fluid. In its progress, like a dilation into infinity, I perceive the mysterious presence of the most contradictory feelings ever to inhabit a human soul. I am simultaneously happy and unhappy, exalted and depressed, overcome by pleasure and despair in the most contradictory harmonies.” -E.M. Cioran, Degradation Through Work

The Paris Review Interviewer: “How do you name your characters?”

Dorothy Parker: “The telephone book and from the obituary columns”

interstice

2008-01-03T22:09:00.000-08:00

Pictures of Shanghai

“From this moment she was convinced she was in the grip of a terrible nightmare, only there was no waking from this one: no, she was quite certain that it was reality, only more so; furthermore she realized that the chilling events in which she had been participant or to which she had been witness (the appearance of the phantasmagorical vehicle, the violence in Erdélyi Sándor Road, the lights going off with all the precision of an explosive device, the inhuman rabble in the station forecourt, and above all this, dominating everything, the cold unremitting stare of the figure in the broadcloth coat) were not merely the oppressive creation of her ever-troubled imagination, but part of a scheme so co-ordinated, so precise, that there could be no doubt of their purpose.” The Melancholy of Resistance, Lászlo Krasznahorkai

“The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.” –Walter Benjamin

“Every epoch, in fact, not only dreams the one to follow but, in dreaming, precipitates its awakening. It bears the end within itself and unfolds it- as Hegel already noticed-by cunning.” –Walter Benjamin Paris, The Capital of the Nineteenth Century

Books read in 2007

2008-01-02T18:47:00.000-08:00

Vanished Act: The Life and Art of Weldon Kees, James Reidel
Low Red Moon, Caitlín R. Kiernan
Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, Noel Riley Fitch
…Or not to Be: A Collection of Suicide Notes, Marc Etkind
The Very Rich Hours of Adrienne Monnier, Memoirs of Adrienne Monnier
Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Invented Lives: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Fitzgerald, James R. Mellow
Life Stories: Profiles from the New Yorker, ed. David Remnick
Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, Lawrence Weschler
Exile’s Return, Malcolm Cowley
Caresse Crosby: From Black Sun to Roccasinibalda, Anna Conover
A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway: The Paris Years, Michael Reynolds
Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald, Scott Donaldson
Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People who love Books and for those who want to Write them, Francine Prose
The Torrents of Spring, Ivan Turgenev
America and The Young Intellectual, Harold Stearns
Three Tales, Gustave Flaubert
Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
Library: An Unquiet History, Matthew Battles
Days and Nights: Novel of a Deserter, Alfred Jarry
After Dark, Haruki Murakami
Despair, Vladimir Nabokov
Contempt, Alberto Moravia
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontė
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife, Sam Savage
La Bâtarde, Violette Leduc
Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein
The City: A Global History, Joel Kotkin
Three Years, Anton Chekhov
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
The Conformist, Alberto Moravia
Everyone was so Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy, A Lost Generation Love Story, Amanda Vaill
Hunger, Knut Hamsun
Scent: The Essential and Mysterious Powers of Smell, Annick LeGuérer
Perfume: The Art and Science of Scent, Cathy Newman
Locus Solus, Raymond Roussel
Jurgen, James Branch Cabell
The Life of the High Countess Gritta Von Ratsinourhouse, Bettine von Armin & Gisela von Armin Grimm
The Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman
The Master and the Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
Dangerous Muse: Lady Caroline Blackwood, Nancy Schoenberger
Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris
The Museum of Useless Efforts, Cristina Peri Rossi
Diary, Chuck Palahnuik
The Defense, Vladimir Nabokov
Axel’s Castle: The Study of the Imaginative Literature 1870-1930, Edmund Wilson
Dubrovsky and Egyptian Nights, Aleksandr Pushkin
The Secret of Scent, LucaTurin
Indiana, George Sand
The Emperor of Scent: Luca Turin, Chandler Burr
From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, Jacques Barzun
A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888/1889, Frederic Morton
A Night Country, Loren Eiseley
Pharmako/Dynamis: Stimulating Plants, Potions and Herbcraft, Dale Pendell
Inferno/ From an Occult Diary, August Strindberg

Some End of the Year Debris

2007-12-31T14:55:00.000-08:00

Thoughts:

Stories. Most people need stories; they need to fabricate fictions to give some order to their lives, or they need stories to fill the holes of their misapprehensions. Creating stories allows one to be the hero of his own myth and god of his own reality.
For me, stories are no way of living; stories are only good for books.

Love can inspire us to be more compassionate and enlightened; but it is also amazing how memories of a failed romance can drag us down into such petty shit. Cf. From an Occult Diary, A. Strindberg

What is the color of "beaver"?

Wandering around the web and grabbing snippets to feed my imagination.

What is “psychogeography”? The jacket flap defines it as a “meditation on the vexed relationship between psyche and place,” and any number of well-spectacled young Ph.D.’s in sociology or urban studies will talk to you of Situationists and leave you with the bar tab. At its writerly best, though, psychogeography seems simpler to me: it is clear and vivid nonfiction writing with a sense of the past and an eye for the present that takes us close to the street. I mean “street” both literally, as in the color of the paving stones and the font of the signage and the shape of the sidewalk, and figuratively, as in the multitudes that pass by, the movers and shakers, the loiterers and bystanders, the beggars and mimes. (A bartender might mix one part local historian, one part flâneur, one part novelist, one part raconteur. Call the resulting cocktail a Peter Ackroyd or a John Berger, a Rebecca Solnit or an Iain Sinclair.)

.....

Hunter Thompson once said that satire became impossible when reality itself was too twisted and I fear that’s become the case.

Museums of Disasters, II

2007-12-24T14:12:00.000-08:00

picture from this site: http://www.kakarigi.net/manu/vijecnic.htm

Museum of genetic catastrophe

“I understand that the idea of bringing something dead back to life is fundamentally frightening,” he went on. “It’s a power that science has come to possess and it makes us queasy, and it should. But there are many viruses that are more dangerous than these—more infectious, far riskier to work with, and less potentially useful.’’

Museum of an extinct race

"The man [Dervis Korkut] so determined to protect a Jewish book was a scion of a prosperus, highly regarded family of Muslim intellectuals, famous for producing judges of Islamic law. He studied theology at Istanbul University and Near Eastern Languages at the Sorbonne. He spoke at least ten languages and served as the Bosnian National Museum’s chief librarian."

Inferno

2007-12-21T09:19:00.000-08:00

Inferno, by August Strindberg, from this site

"I had been reading the lovely little pamphlet "The Delight of Dying" and it had made me long to leave this world. To reconnoitre the borderland bewteen life and death I would lie down on my bed, uncork a bottle of cyanide of potassium and allow its deadly fumes to escape into the room. He would draw near, that old Readper, so mild and so seductive, but at the last moment someone always appeared or something always happened to cut me short. The waiter would enter on some errand, a wasp would fly at the window."
-August Strindberg Inferno

But if you are in the mood for something really absurd: http://www.strindbergandhelium.com/index.html

downturned randomness

2007-12-05T15:29:00.000-08:00

It has been a week of feeling sad and defeated, but those feelings can only go on for so long. Sometimes I even feel like I want to stop writing; but I can never stop thinking.

One step positive step in the world: Absinthe, it's back!

Mostly, it seemed to him, they didn’t like the monkey.

“I had the image of a spider monkey beating on a skull with femur bones,” Mr. Winters said. But he said that the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau thought the label “implied that there are hallucinogenic, mind-altering or psychotropic qualities” to the product.

“I said, ‘You get all that just from looking at a monkey?’”

I heard a review of this novella on NPR while we were driving back from Mendocino the weekend after Thanksgiving. The reviewer glowed so much about the story, it intrigued me enough to consider reading it.

Last Night at the Lobster, by Stewart O’Nan

The novel contains nuanced portraits of the tensions between the workers, Manny’s rueful confusion over an affair — now over — with a waitress and his profound sadness as his work of the past several years comes to an abrupt end.

The novel’s most dramatic plot points include a vomiting toddler, a slashed leather jacket and a power failure as a snowstorm rages outside. “It is a very quiet piece,” Mr. O’Nan said. “But I think it gets a lot of life into it, considering it’s only 140 pages or so.”

196

2007-11-27T22:23:00.001-08:00

The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd; the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are. The sensation we come to have of ourselves is of a deserted field at dusk, sad with reeds next to a river without boats, its glistening waters blackening between wide banks.

-Fernando Pessoa The Book of Disquiet.

Fresno

2007-11-27T22:19:00.000-08:00

fresno picon

2007-11-20T13:13:00.000-08:00

Every time I visit Europe, I am always struck by a difference in quality and pacing of life compared to the US. I have tried to wrap my thoughts about this and to come up with a reasonable theory. Then I read this interview with Julen Abio, vice-president of the New York Basque Club, and what he said, so simply, summed it all up for me:

"Well, here [US] you leave your house, get into your car, put on the radio, get to work and once again back home. Here you live for work, and there [Europe], you work to live."

Oftentimes, here, I feel the pressure to define myself through the projects that I have accomplished, and the projects I have lined up for future accomplishment. Or I feel like a nobody because of my lack of ambition. There is some strange importance placed on what you have done and who you know. It has become the friend-collecting, personality-product era, but these are not my values. What I want out of this life is very straightforward: I want to understand this world that I live in; I want to read great books, look at inspired art and listen to emotionally-deep music; I want to cook well; I want to have conversations with intelligent people; I want to travel to many places; I want to be a good friend; and I want to love.

Anyway, this weekend I went to Fresno, I cannot say that Fresno was ever on my top ten or even top 100 places to visit, but I have never been there, and there's always something worth seeing in a place you've never been to. I learned that Fresno was home to many immigrant Basques in the 1900's and there were a number of hotels and restaurants that catered to these Basque sheep-herders. There are still a few of these places left in Fresno-so of course, we visited one: the Basque Hotel. We tried their famous and cheap Picon and ate their family style dinner. The Picon is an aperitif and you never drink one with a meal. It has a stunning grenadine color, with a slightly spicy- nutty flavour. From this website:

The recipe for Picon Punch is simple: it's basically a liquid parfait built out of layers of grenadine, soda water, amer, and brandy. This recipe was developed in San Francisco by Basque immigrants early in the 20th century and was later exported back to the old Basque country (a stretch of the Pyrenees mountains that spans the border between France and Spain) where it became the celebrated "National Drink" of the Basque people.

The dinner was more food than I usually eat all day, but I soldiered through it. There were seven courses: soup (vegetable), salad, beans, (garbanzo) a beef stew, (yes, I ate it, I had not had beef in over ten years, and yes I survived) potato salad, and the entrée (frog legs). There was also ice-cream at the end, but we sent it back because we could not eat anymore. If I were a real meat eater, I would have had their lamb-chops, which is their famous entrée.

more Basque family-style dinning

and if you want to visit Fresno

Bruges

2007-11-16T15:38:00.000-08:00

Places I would like to visit in Europe, in no order:
2. Bruges

Picture #1- from this website: http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/fnart/arch/bruges_arch.html

Picture #2- from this blog: http://sebald.wordpress.com/category/eugene-atget/

I first heard about Bruges a couple of years ago when I read the novel by George Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte. The Symbolist novel is heavily colored with languid prose about a widower's grief. It prominently features the city and the city's decaying repose.

And a great article from this blog:
http://symbolabs.blogspot.com/2007/01/three-symbolist-cities-bruges-ravenna.html

History:
Bruges (Brugge) was founded in the 9th century by Vikings who settled here at the end of the little river 'de Reie'. The name Bruges is probably derived from the old-Scandinavian word 'Brygga', which means 'harbor, or mooring place'. Because of the proximity of the North Sea, the settlement very quickly became an important international harbor. A sea-arm, called the Zwin, connected Bruges with the North Sea. The young settlement acquired city rights as early as the 12th century. At that time a first protective wall was built around Bruges.

Already in the 13th century Bruges was an important international trading center. Traders from all over the then known world came to the city to sell their products to each other and to buy Flemish cloth, a internationally acclaimed textile product, produced in different Flemish cities (e.g. Gent). In the early 14th century Bruges was the scene of political unrest between the citizens and the count of Flanders. Because of this unrest the French king tried to annex the county of Flanders, but the population managed to kick out the French garisson on May the 18th 1302. Later the Flemish army beat the French army in the 'Battle of the Golden Spurs' on July the 11th in the Flemish city of Kortrijk.

In the 14th century Bruges turned also into an international financial and trading center. Several countries had their own representation in Bruges: the Italians, the Germans, the Scottish, the Spanish made the city into a true European center where different languages could be heard and where the most exotic products could be found.

The decline of Bruges' wealth started in the 15th century : the unstoppable silting up of the Zwin, the competition with the bigger harbor of Antwerp and the crisis in the cloth industry resulted in less commercial activity. The crisis, however, was not immediately noticable. Bruges continued to construct splendid late-gothic buildings and churches, and the Flemish painting school (with e.g. the brothers Van Eyck and Hans Memling ) started to flourish as never before.
By the end of the 16th century the former glory was only a memory and Bruges slipped into a wintersleep that took several centuries. New textile industries were introduced in the 19th century, but to no avail. In the middle of the 1800's Brugge was the poorest city in Belgium.

peripeteia

2007-11-14T10:52:00.001-08:00

picture #1- I don't remember where I found this-
picture #2- from this great website: http://curiousexpeditions.org/2007/09/a_librophiliacs_love_letter_1.html

"I had a certain talent for friendship, but I never had any friends, either because they simply didn't turn up, or because the friendship I had imagined was an error of my dreams. I've always lived alone, and ever more alone as I become more self-aware. "
-Fernando Pessoa Book of Disquiet

"…recordings seemed to become a kind of phantasmagoria, a virtual reality that threatened to replace concert life." -Alex Ross (New Yorker)

"Le Chants de Maldoror is full of the familiar ferocities and blasphemies, the familiar somber confessions of uncommon and magnificent sins, carried, however, to unprecedented lengths by a young writer who evidently felt that his predecessors had set him a high standard to surpass; but the images of his nightmares and tirades have that peculiar phantasmagoric quality which was to be characteristic of Symbolism." -Edmund Wilson Axel's Castle

more Oakland

2007-11-11T17:42:00.001-08:00

"Art is the dark wish for all things. They want to be the image of our secrets,...concealed and revealed at once" - R.M. Rilke

Dubrovnik

2007-11-07T16:13:00.001-08:00

Places I would like to visit in Europe, in no order:

1. Dubrovnik

picture #1 from this site:

www.regent-holidays.co.uk/dubrovnik.html

picture #2 from this site:

http://www.agencija-vangogh.si/eng/dubrovnik.asp

Dubrovnik is an historic city on the Adriatic Sea coast in the extreme south of Croatia, positioned at the terminal end of the Isthmus of Dubrovnik. It is a seaport and the centre of Dubrovnik-Neretva county.

Since 1979, the historic centre of Dubrovnik has been included in the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites.

The prosperity of the city of Dubrovnik has always been based on maritime trade. In the Middle Ages, as the Republic of Ragusa, it became the only eastern Adriatic city-state to rival Venice. Supported by its wealth and skilled diplomacy, the city achieved a remarkable level of development, particularly during the 15th and 16th centuries. Ragusa was one of the centres of the development of the Croatian language and literature, home to many notable poets, playwrights, painters, mathematicians, physicists and other scholars.

from Wiki.

and from an article in the Smithsonian Magazine.

History resides everywhere here. “I was a child during the Italian occupation of parts of Croatia in World War II, and I still remember when the Partisans won that war,” the 71-yearold helmsman said. “Today, Tito’s communism seems to have vanished in the wind. I think it’s easier for people who have a past to put their lives in perspective.”

“In many respects, the 4,000 people living within Dubrovnik’s old city walls function as they did hundreds of years ago,” said Nikola Obuljen, 64, president of Dubrovnik’s city council, as he ambled across a limestone thoroughfare polished by centuries of foot traffic. “Venice has palazzos and the RialtoBridge, but Dubrovnik is a functioning Renaissance city where people live in the houses and shop at the markets.”

I first came to Dubrovnik in 1999 as a visitor searching for an eye in the Balkan storm. Kosovo then was in flames; Belgrade under siege. Bosnia remained intact only by force of international fiat. I needed a respite from Sarajevo, where, working as a journalism instructor, I happened to live a mile from a mass grave. That devastated city was recovering from the war that had ended there only the previous year. But as I drove south from Sarajevo toward Dalmatia, Bosnia’s once-fertile farmland offered only a succession of ghostly hamlets ethnically cleansed of inhabitants. Mostar, the last major stop before the Dinaric Alps, had been reduced to rubble. The Ottoman bridge that for centuries had spanned the Neretva River was destroyed, a casualty of the malignant xenophobia then infecting Bosnia and Herzegovina.

But as I traveled down the coastal highway beyond the mountains, the air began to warm, scenes of destruction grew less frequent and police actually began to smile. At the village of Ston, gateway to the Peljesac Peninsula, I entered the old, 530-square-mile Republic of Dubrovnik, which enjoyed an independent status for a millennium, to 1808. For the next hour, I meandered past fishing villages nestled beneath foothills verdant with vineyards. In the distance, an archipelago seemed to float in the mist. And then it appeared in the twilight: a walled city rising from the rocky coast like an Adriatic Camelot.

altruistic?

2007-11-05T12:30:00.000-08:00

picture: The Lovers, Remedios Varo

from this book review:

Altruism Equation: Seven Scientists Search for the Origins by Lee Alan Dugatkin

But Robert Trivers was not interested in biology; he wanted to be a lawyer, and it would take a tragic breakdown (a mania that took the form of staying up all night, night after night, reading Wittgenstein and finally collapsing) to bring him closer to the animal world. [...]

His mentor was Bill Drury, an ornithologist whom the young Trivers learned to love and revere. "Bill and I were walking in the woods one day," Trivers once told a reporter, "and I told him that my first breakdown had been so painful that I had resolved that if I ever felt another one coming on, I would kill myself. Lately, however, I had changed my mind, and drawn up a list of ten people I would kill first in that event. I wanted to know if this was going forwards or backwards. He thought for a while, then he said, 'Can I add three names to that list?' That was his only comment." With Drury's encouragement, Trivers signed up for a doctorate in zoology armed with a plan to study monkeys. But his adviser was a herpetologist, and pointed Trivers to Jamaica and lizards instead. "When we flew to Jamaica," Trivers remembers, "I took one look at the women and one look at the island and decided to become a lizard man if that's what it took to go back there." Thus was born the career of the man who would pretend to explain altruism.

Oakland Autumn

2007-11-02T18:26:00.000-07:00

"Become a mariner in the seas of one's self." -Lawrence Weschler

museums of disasters

2007-10-31T11:52:00.000-07:00

Picture: Burning of the Duchess Anna Amalia Library from Wiki

The Museum of Broken Relationships

Museums of Unworkable Devices

The museum of food failures

The museum of dust

Museum of useless efforts

The Museum of Lost Interactions

The Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies

Harold Stearns- critic of America

2007-10-26T11:24:00.000-07:00

I blogged about Harold Stearns before: critic and intellectual. I ran into a Times article about his death; notice the date, it was written in 1943.

Perhaps the most expatriated of the young expatriates was Harold Stearns, who was known to his intimates as a "picturesque ruin." Behind Harold Stearns, in America, lay the broken promise of a brilliant career—essays in The New Republic, editorship of The Dial, prime mover of the famous iconoclastic symposium Civilization in the United States. To the ruin of his career, Expatriate Stearns seemed anxious to add the ruin of himself. The news of his death caused friends to remember the days when, as he confessed in his autobiographical The Street I Know, he made a career of drink and an occupation out of borrowing money. Remembering the stir caused by his symposium, viper-tongued critics would say: "There goes American civilization—in the gutter."

the new me

2007-10-26T10:51:00.000-07:00

go here to re-create yourself- http://www.buildyourwildself.com/

more amusing muses

2007-10-23T20:56:00.001-07:00

The Surrealists' Muse, by Francine Du Plessix Gray, from the New Yorker

“…Marie-Laure [de Noailles] met the last great love of her life, a Spanish painter named Oscar Dominguez, one of the few heterosexuals she ever took up with. Dominguez, four years older than she, was born in the Canary Islands and, after moving to Paris, hung out on the fringes of the Surrealist movement. A man whose face resembled that of an Easter Island statue, Dominguez was a heavy drinker given to outrageous behavior- he would shout out “My penis is hard as gold” at the dinner table. According to a friend, the couple looked like the union of a transvestite Louis XVI and a Cro-Magnon man, and even at formal parties they pawed at each other like teenagers.”

“…there was something subversive about the institution of the fairy tale in France during the 1690s, for it enabled writers to create a dialogue about norms, manners, and power that evaded court censorship and freed the fantasy of the writers and readers, while at the same time paying tribute to the French code of civilité and the majesty of the aristocracy. Once certain discursive paradigms and conventions were established, a writer could demonstrate his of her “genius” by rearranging, expanding, deepening, and playing with the known functions of a genre that, by 1715, had already formed a type of canon…”

-Jack Zipes from the Introduction, Spells of Enchantment

scrutator

2007-10-19T15:49:00.000-07:00

Some concluded or abandoned blogs, that I have run into, for later browsing:

http://www.field-notes.net/
...musings from a sidelong naturalist about poetry, place and wonder.

1.02.2005
I’m the kind of person you can tell a joke to several times. I simply don’t remember them. I like it that way—I have the true enjoyment of being made to laugh more than once. I’ve become that kind of bird watcher. No longer writing down and keeping track of which birds I see, and remembering which I “know” and which I don’t “know”, I’m free now to see them for the first time every time.

http://redthreads.blogspot.com/
His near stammering. With disconcerting promptness one word hid behind another. -- Maurice Blanchot, Le Dernier Homme

27.9.07
Faced with the prospect of a day or the memory of a night, the thin grey sheet, twilight of writing. You write to empty yourself, or hope the act of writing, will do.The pen forms a stroke, a single letter-word, "I," first person singular. Or the downstroke of a T as in the word "The" or "This." A single line and the unconquerable absence. Thus,

http://ourpalacesarequitesmall.blogspot.com/
"A controlled study of situational decomposition."
Mildly obsessive-compulsive. Keeps a messy desk. Writes in 4-5 notebooks simultaneously, this being one.

Wednesday, September 20
[silence].
The damp has set in, and rot everywhere

objet trouvé

2007-10-16T14:26:00.000-07:00

1st photo- Photographer - Mark Segal
2nd picture - Remedios Varo- "Creation of Birds"

"… all forms of intellectual activity- even those which seem on the surface very different: poetry and mathematics…are fundamentally the same sort of thing, merely arrangements or organizations of selected elements of experience."- Edmund Wilson Axel's Castle

You can be me when I'm gone…..

axel's castle

2007-10-09T12:03:00.000-07:00

"The world of imagination is shown us in Yeats's early poetry as something infinitely delightful, infinitely seductive, as something to which one becomes addicted, with which one becomes delirious and drunken- and as something which is somehow incompatible with, and fatal to, the good life of that actual world which is so full of weeping and from which it is so sweet to withdraw."

Axel's Castle -Edmund Wilson

synchronicity and blood

2007-10-04T12:05:00.001-07:00

The first photo from this photographer- (how I feel sometimes)
http://www.chantalmichel.ch/fotografie/index.html

In the past week I had two dreams of blood. One of the dreams I had cut myself and felt the blood run down my hand. The sight of the blood made my stomach knot up so tightly that it woke me up and I felt nauseous. The next day at work, I had two bloody noses.
The other dream I had: a basin that was overflowing with blood.

I remember reading about the connection to blood and perfume; it was in a book titled, Scent, by Annick Le Guérer: "the power of perfume have centered upon its similarity to magical potions, its association with the mythologies of vital fluids such as sap and blood". There is a whole chapter on Blood, Incense and Ritual.

I looked for a blood in contemporary perfumes, the closest thing I found was with blood orange: Maitre Parfumeur et Gantier Sanguine Muskissime, reviewed here.

Sanguine is one of the four humors that relate to blood. The other three are: Choleric, Melancholic, and Phlegmatic.

The Sanguine temperament, according to Wiki:

Sanguine indicates the personality of an individual with the temperament of blood, the season of spring (wet and hot), and the element of air. A person who is sanguine is generally optimistic, cheerful, confident, popular, and fun-loving. He/She can be day dreamy and off-task to the point of not accomplishing anything and can be impulsive, possibly acting on whims in an unpredictable fashion. Sanguines usually have a lot of energy, but have a problem finding a way to direct the energy. This also describes the manic phase of a bipolar disorder.

I'm more of a Choleric type, myself.

Some history of the blood orange:

"The Blood, Moro, or Maltese Oranges are very old orange varieties. There is some historical evidence that the blood orange hybrid first appeared in Southern Europe around 1850 and was then brought to North America many decades later by Spanish and Italian immigrants. Commonly know throughout most of the world as "blood," "blood-red" or "blush" oranges, they have a number of other common or regional names."

Last week, within one hour I read two reviews of the same book, not intentionally. One in the New Yorker, the other in Raintaxi (which does not have it available online).

from the New Yorker

In Her Absence
by Antonio Muñoz Molina, translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen (Other Press)

Mario believes that his wife, Blanca, has disappeared and been replaced by an impostor who is almost identical, only more sensual and tender. Thus begins the story of an unlikely marriage. Mario, guided by the lessons of his working-class origins, values “almost nothing in life more than stability.” But Blanca, privileged and with an “innate” sense of entitlement, has come to feel that their life is one “from which great experiences were absent.” Mario is infatuated with Blanca; Blanca is infatuated with art. As her interest shifts from one trendy artist to another, Mario strives to keep pace. Muñoz Molina layers a subtle satire of artistic hypocrisy with a stirring account of class separation. Mario is entranced by his wife’s “aura of uncertainty” but cannot escape his own self-annihilating caution. “Penury,” he reflects, “makes people fearful and conformist.”

dangerous blonde sunday

2007-10-01T12:45:00.000-07:00

Sunday, I spent nearly the whole day in bed reading the biography of Caroline Blackwood (Dangerous Muse: The Life of Lady Caroline Blackwood by Nancy Schoenberger). Blackwood was born in London in 1931, grew up in Ireland and lived sporadically in America until her death in1996. She is famous for her beauty, her eccentricity, her writings and her husbands (the painter, Lucian Freud and the poet, Robert Lowell). What struck me about her was her slovenliness, her alcoholism and her morbidity. Nevertheless, it makes for a magnetic read. I wondered if she had not been beautiful and titled, would she have become a writer and would she have even been famous at all? I am quite enchanted by muses, how little they are acknowledged and valued and the creatively inspired havoc they can unleash on their lovers/artists.

I came across this book while browsing the late Theresa Duncan's blog; she quotes in her post, a little from this review of the biography. I was immediately intrigued and went out to check out the book from my library. The pictures above are: Lucian Freud's portrait of Lady Blackwood and the cover of the book, which is a photo taken by Walker Evans.

Here is an excerpt of an article written about Lowell and his last minutes of life- it gives insight into the ill-fated marriage between Lowell and Blackwood:

On this day [September 12] in 1977 the poet Robert Lowell died at the age of sixty in the back seat of a New York City taxi. He had hailed the cab at JFK airport and was heading up to West 67th Street, returning to his ex-wife, the writer Elizabeth Hardwick. He had just flown back from a disastrous trip to Ireland, where he had gone to explain to his present wife, the Anglo-Irish Lady Caroline Blackwood -- like Hardwick a writer, as well as heiress to the Guinness Stout fortune -- why their marriage was over. The meeting at Blackwood's estate outside Dublin had of course ended badly, with Blackwood storming out with her three children -- the son she had had with Lowell and two daughters from two former marriages, one to the painter, Lucien Freud (grandson of Sigmund Freud), one to the composer, Israel Citcowitz. At the end, Lowell still clutched in his stiffening arms one of Lucien Freud's paintings of the young Blackwood, staring out from the canvas into the void.

California Floristic

2007-09-26T13:57:00.001-07:00

Something I was thinking about while riding BART to work: California plant communities. This may be a strange thing to be thinking about at 8am, but I used to be, and still am, a bit of a botany nerd. I've taken some botanical trips to some `interesting plant areas of CA; two of the more notable areas I have visited are the White Mountains and the Siskiyou Mountains. The oldest living trees, Pinus longaeva inhabit the White Mts., and in the Siskiyou Mts., there exists, alongside California conifers, other conifers that usually inhabit farther north, Alaska and Northern Canada.

California is a biodiversity hotspot, meaning that a high number of native or endemic plants are found here. Where I live, Oakland, the plant community is considered Coastal Sage Scrub. But you can find very little evidence of this now. Depending on what system you use, Munz, Ornduff, Jepson and etc., there are up to 30 plant communities; some even argue that each city, town or even hillside is its own plant community, although I find that a little extreme.

There must have been something in the air for me to ponder California plant life, for when I arrived at work, I saw this headline: New Plant and Animal Species Discovered in Vietnam
There's always great hope when we discover new things in this world.

on the pictures: 1. Coastal Sage Scrub- the Santa Cruz coast (July 2003)

2. a conifer in the Siskiyou wilderness

3. A scene of the White Mts.

Iris

2007-09-21T19:54:00.000-07:00

Imagination loved to wander the streets. The sun delighted her and the sounds of conversation, cars driving, and footsteps would make her smile. The wind would come up and blow her dusty, copper-burnt hair into a halo around her wide-open pale, green eyes. She would let her nose take direction, and she would joyously pursue the smell of daphne, stomping through front yards until she happily located the scented culprit. Those were the days when we held each other’s hand.

Life gets hard. Challenges can nose their way into the sunscented happiness. It was hard for me to let go of her hand, I had to once in awhile. But I always wanted to take her hand again.

Oh, what a petulant one she is. I always hope she would understand and not stay angry for long. My moods are my moods; I cope by navigating into architectures of withdrawal. It is a complex building with rooms going into more rooms. I never felt lonely as long as I knew that she was out there.

Some of places on the street I cannot go back to, they are haunted for me. I never felt comfortable brushing up against the traces of my memory. Imagination could spin those memories into something else. She could re-call the story that would erase my regret. She was always my best friend. I whispered all my grieved secrets to her while we slept. Her hair intertwined with my hair, there was no boundary between her skin and mine. Our limbs flung onto the other. So of course I began to miss her when she was gone.

"Free of disappointment and tedium, the days went by blissfully. In the mornings, we would wake up happy, joyful at being together; each day presented us with a vast, unknown world of surprises. Familiar things ceased to be familiar, recovering their newness, while other things, like park and lakes, became inviting and maternal. We went around the streets noticing things other people didn't see. Aromas, colors, light, time, and space were more intense for us. As if under the effects of a powerful drug, our sense of perception had grown more acute. But we weren't drunk, just perceptive and calm, endowed with an unusual capacity to be in harmony with the world." - Cristina Peri Rossi Full Stop

season of hoaxes

2007-09-19T12:00:00.000-07:00

Why do we fall for hoaxes? Some hoaxes seem too absurd to believe, and yet people believe. Is it the impossibility that we fall for? Perhaps in this life of much-desired security that some event, so improbable enchants us. And perhaps, in this pre-ordained world, that something can escape and exist outside of all expectation? Yet, when the hoax is discovered, oh the wrath. Nevertheless, no one seems to learn from it, and one waits to fall for the next hoax. Below the story of the word that never was, the wine mixer that never existed, the pianist that never played and the story that was never written.

Turn to page 1,850 of the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia and you’ll find an entry for Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, a fountain designer turned photographer who was celebrated for a collection of photographs of rural American mailboxes titled “Flags Up!” Mountweazel, the encyclopedia indicates, was born in Bangs, Ohio, in 1942, only to die “at 31 in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine.”

If Mountweazel is not a household name, even in fountain-designing or mailbox-photography circles, that is because she never existed."

If indeed Parker’s hundred-point 1921 Pétrus was a fake, such hubris might not be misplaced. Could Rodenstock have become so proficient at making fake wine that his fakes tasted as good as, or even better than, the real thing? When I asked Parker about the bottle, he hastened to say that even the best wine critics are fallible. Yet he reiterated that the bottle was spectacular. “If that was a fake, he should be a mixer,” Parker said. “It was wonderful.”

Fundamental to the burgeoning interest in Hatto was awe that she could be so tirelessly productive during what should have been her retirement. Her exploits seemed even more remarkable after Richard Dyer, then the chief music critic of the Boston Globe, interviewed her in the summer of 2005 and wrote an article that began, “Joyce Hatto must be the greatest living pianist that almost no one has ever heard of.” The next paragraph contained a surprising revelation: “Hatto, now 76, has not played in public in more than 25 years because of an ongoing battle with cancer. She was once told that it is ‘impolite to look ill,’ and after a critic commented adversely on her appearance, she resolved to stop playing concerts.”

The most fascinating aspect of hoaxes is the extent to which they tend to escape the control of their creators, absorbing new accomplices along the way. As McHale observed in a recent interview, literary hoaxes are ''cut loose from their source, or outright lie about it, and so float free, in a certain sense, so that they can be reclaimed further down the line and used for all sorts of unintended purposes."

424

2007-09-17T21:38:00.001-07:00

"Every day things happen in the world that can't be explained by any law of things we know. Every day they're mentioned and forgotten, and the same mystery that brought them takes them away, transforming their secret into oblivion. Such is the law by which things that can't be explained must be forgotten. The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows." - Fernando Pessoa

gioconda

2007-09-14T12:30:00.001-07:00

Stolen pictures: top-http://punctum.typepad.com/photos/gold_leaf_photos/index.html
bottom- from W Magazine October 2007
Photographed by Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott

My imagination has left me. She left neither a note nor a forwarding address. One day she said, "I'm going out for a walk", then under her breathe she muttered, "and I'm never coming back." I did not believe her then, she is often petulant. When she was gone for a while, I thought she was hiding among the books by my bed. But she could not be found.

I know why she has left, She felt unappreciated, under-utilized, abandoned. I changed. I no longer lingered in dreamy dialogue with her. I was too immersed in history and science. I wanted answers, I stopped drifting along the avenues of possibilities. I was tired of all the things that could be. History steals sleep from the reader, dreams become truncated, filled with events. Imagination always wants room to spread about, leave her socks on the floor and mess up the bedcovers. I found myself always picking up after her, then resentment started to invade. It beings with cutting words then turns into pricked sideways glares followed by unsuppressed blown raspberries . No wonder she left.

No one wants to be forgotten, as though you never existed.

I thought I caught glimpse of her among the trees, but she dissolved into smoke. And the leaves fluttered helplessly with laughter around my head. I did not run after the apparition, I'm too tired.

"One falls in love with certain places restlessly associated with the beloved and strolls among them, alone but intimately accompanied." - Cristina Peri Rossi Mona Lisa

useless efforts

2007-09-12T09:53:00.001-07:00

Pictures stolen from this website: http://www.zymoglyphic.org/galleries.html
Amazing stuff!

"Some of the useless efforts are beautiful, others somber. We don't always agree about their classification.

There are men who have taken long journeys in pursuit of inexistent places, unrecoverable memories, deceased women, disappeared friends. There are children who undertook impossible tasks with great resolve.

Entire sections of the museum are dedicated to voyages. We reconstruct them from the pages of the books. After a time of drifting across various seas, traversing dense forests, discovering cities and marketplaces, crossing bridges, sleeping on trains and station benches, the travelers forget the purpose of the trip yet nevertheless continue traveling. And then one day- lost in a flood, trapped in the subway, asleep forever in a doorway- they disappear without a trace. And no one comes to claim them."

The Museum of Useless Efforts -Crista Peri Rossi

John Lilburne

2007-09-05T11:31:00.001-07:00

Who's that writing? John the agitator

"If only John Lilburne were left in the world, then John would quarrel with Lilburne and Lilburne with John" Henry Marten

picture 1 is from this website- a Libertarian who travels the world giving lectures- I'm not a Libertarian, but he does have nice pictures on his website-

From Wikipedia:

John Lilburne (1614?–August 29, 1657 England), also known as Freeborn John.

John Lilburne began in earnest his campaign of agitation for freeborn rights, the rights that all Englishmen are born with, which are different from privileges bestowed by a monarch or a government.

John Lilburne was arrested upon information by an informer acting for The Stationers' Company and brought before the Court of Star Chamber. Instead of being charged with an offense he was asked how he pleaded. John Lilburne demanded to be presented in English with the charges brought against him (much of the written legal work of the time was in Latin). The Court refused Lilburne's request. The court then threw him in prison and again brought him back to court and demanded a plea. Again John Lilburne demanded to know the charges brought against him.

The authorities then resorted to flogging him with a three-thonged whip on his bare back, as he was dragged by his hands tied to the rear of an ox cart from Fleet Prison to the pillory at Westminster. He was then forced to stoop in the pillory where he still managed to campaign against his censors, while distributing more unlicensed literature to the crowds. He was then gagged. Finally he was thrown in prison. He was taken back to the court and again imprisoned.

This began the first in a long series of trials that lasted throughout his life for what John Lilburne called his "freeborn rights". As a result of these trials a growing number of supporters began to call him "Freeborn John" and they even struck a medal in his honor to that effect. It is this trial that has been cited by constitutional jurists and scholars in the United States of America as being one of the historical foundations of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. It is also cited within the 1966 majority opinion of Miranda v. Arizona by the U.S. Supreme Court.

On the other side, perhaps related, an apartment that costs 45 million dollars? Not even a house, but an apartment in a 201 unit apartment building in New York City-absurd. From the New Yorker

A building like this leaves you two choices: you can resist it or you can yield to it. On one level, there’s something unsettling about the whole thing—is costume-drama luxury the best that our new century has to offer? And what are we to make of the feeding frenzy surrounding it, in an already hypertrophied real-estate market?

Bell Wheel- Museum of Jurassic Technology

2007-08-29T19:47:00.001-07:00

Locus Solus- Jurassic Technology

2007-08-29T16:14:00.001-07:00

Picture 1 from: http://pdphoto.org/
The Museum of Jurassic Technology.

picture 2 from Tom Kidd's art website:http://spellcaster.com/tomkidd/index.htm

The surrealists call Roussel the "Proust of dreams" and after reading this heavily detailed novel of his, I can concur. We meet the main, and one of the only characters of this strange novel, Martial Canterel, on a tour of his estate. The reader is part of an unnamed group who views enigmatic scenes. The scenes are vividly described to the reader. After viewing the insensible scenes, Canterel then elucidates what has been shown.

Locus Solus, by Raymond Roussel, has no real plot except for this. There are no characters except for Canterel and some minor characters named, but never fleshed out. There are stories within the stories which build up the novel. We (and the character that represents us) are always outside. There are those who are convinced that clues are strewn within Roussel's works, and by some key, a mystery can be solved. Reading Locus Solus, one might be tempted to take this view in consideration to make sense of it. Perhaps.

While reading Locus Solus, I had deja vu, a sense of slippage. In December 2006, I took my first and only trip to L.A. A friend highly recommended a place to visit, this was confirmed by some guide books that I consulted. So on our first full day in L.A., I organized our day. First we were to stop at the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Of course, we arrived too early and went to visit some avantgarde architecture which is also in Culver City.

A little after 10AM, we arrived at the nondescript storefront that is the entrance of the museum. We spent a half-hour in the entrance were bookstore is to be found just looking at all the fascniating books. We wandered through this strange and hypnotizing place. I was particularly entranced by the bell-wheel, which I heard tinkling as soon as I entered the museum. I tracked it down by listening, ever curious by the falling sound. I finally found it inthe dark Athanasius Kircher exhibit. Later, around 1Pm, I think, we were allowed upstairs to have tea and cookies. We looked at the Cat's Cradle exhibit along with another, which I cannot remember.

Reading the narrator's tour in Locus Solus reminded me of this visit. We wander undecipherable scenes with little clues to understand what we are seeing or how we are to interpret such scenes. Of course, at the museum's bookstore I purchased Lawrence Weschler's book to try to grasp more meaning. I am not the only one to make this connection.

kypros

2007-08-28T16:35:00.000-07:00

Kypros is an ancient Greek perfume mentioned by Theophrastus . It contained cardamon and a sweet-scented material called aspalathus which had first been steeped in sweet wine. It is used by men and was used to counter lassitude. -Nigel Groom, The New Perfume Handbook

It is times like these that I feel my thoughts are pressed like leaves between pages of the texts I read.

axenic

2007-08-24T13:53:00.001-07:00

"Every reader, as he reads, is actually a reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth." -Marcel Proust

I read, I read incessantly. I read partially to escape this world which brutalizes me, but I also read to glean clues and insights about this place I am forced to inhabit. I read to gain comprehension. I am often horrified by the people of this world and their behaviour, yet I am flooded with insatiable curiosity to peer into their motives. Yes, I attempt to construct a world in texts parallel to the world I see outside my window. I want my mind to be re-ordered, yet the words intact.

Contrarily though, I wonder if all this reading puts me out of sync with the rest of humanity? Reading alters time; I wander the passages of someone else's thoughts and mental departures.

"Artists' fame is the most monstrous of all, for it implies the idea of immortality. Every novel created with real passion aspires quite naturally to a lasting aesthetic value. This is the novelist's curse: his honesty is bound to the vile stake of his megalomania." -Milan Kudera

scent of Vienna?

2007-08-21T20:43:00.001-07:00

More stolen pictures: 1. Ernst Haas- Photographer, born in Vienna 1921
2. A photo by Ernst Haas- and yes, that is Marilyn Monroe, from Arthur Miller's The Misfits, 1960

More thoughts on Vienna, I was imagining, what would a perfume inspired by Vienna smell like?

Like Diorella?

"Start with the obvious: Diorella is a profoundly strange perfume. A Frenchman I said this to became very defensive and replied, ''Diorella is a classic!'' Which was not only irrelevant -- it also missed the point entirely. Can you describe Diorella? People say, ''Intensely flowery''; they say, ''Fresh yet weightless''; they say, ''Notes of citrus and ripe fruit'' and blah-blah-blah. O.K., fine. All of this is wrong: what is wonderful about Diorella is that it smells like a new fur coat that has been rubbed with a very creamy mint toothpaste. Not gel. Paste. It is a great, great fragrance. It was created for Dior by the legendary perfumer Edmond Roudnitska in 1972, and it feels like 1932 and 2022 at the same time."

No- Maybe more like Nombre Noir:

"The flower at the core of Nombre Noir was half-way between a rose and a violet, but without a trace of the sweetness of either, set instead against an austere, almost saintly back-ground of cigar-box cedar notes. At the same time, it wasn't dry, and seemed to be glistening with a liquid freshness that made its deep colors glow like a stained-glass window."
-Luca Turin

This scent would follow the end song of the plays and stories of Arthur Schnitzler- Wiener Moderne writer.

"Schnitzler's final stories are, inevitably, elegies for a vanished world. It is surely significant that several of them end in suicide, as if the self-destruction of individuals embodied the disaster of a whole society rushing into oblivion. In the novella "Night Games," a young officer, Lieutenant Wilhelm Kasda—precisely the sort of person Schnitzler would once have satirized—is ruined in a game of baccarat. He has a day to raise the money or his honor as an officer will be lost and suicide his only option. Few writers could hope to equal the intensity with which Schnitzler imagines Kasda's desperation as he begs for money, first from a rich uncle and then from a woman he slept with once and then neglected. When the suicide comes, however, the narration switches to a tragicomic mode that is almost Chekhovian. The uncle, arriving too late with the money, cuts a painfully foolish figure beside the corpse."

debouch

2007-08-17T14:20:00.000-07:00

Stolen pictures- left side- from this website: http://capacioglu.stumbleupon.com/

the right, Hiroshi Sugimoto, from this site- http://www.kultureflash.net/archive/68/.

Sugimoto is currently being exhibited at the De Young Museum in San Francisco, I saw the exhibit, it covers the variety of his photos; from the minimalism (as shown in this photo) to his faux-figuratives.

Today's obsessions:

What would ancient perfume smell like? "Extracts of anise, pine, coriander, bergamot, almond, and parsley "

Joseph Conrad:

"To survey with wonder the changes of one's own self is a fascinating pursuit for idle hours. The field is so wide, the surprises so varied,the subject so full of unprofitable but curious hints as to the work of unseen forces, that one does not weary easily of it. I am not speaking here of megalomaniacs who rest uneasy under the crown of their unbounded conceit--who really never rest in this world, and when out of it goon fretting and fuming on the straitened circumstances of their last habitation, where all men must lie in obscure equality. Neither am I thinking of those ambitious minds who, always looking forward to some aim of aggrandizement, can spare no time for a detached, impersonal glance upon them selves"

The Estonian language:

"The majority of European languages belong to the Indo-European language group (e.g. Spanish, Polish, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Albanian, Romany, Greek or Welsh). Of the ancient European languages, once so widespread throughout the continent, Basque in the Pyrenees, the Finno-Ugric languages in the North and Central Europe, and Caucasian languages (e.g. Georgian) in the southeastern corner of Europe have managed to survive.

The Estonian language belongs to the Finnic branch of Finno-Ugric group of languages. It is not therefore related to the neighbouring Indo-European languages such as Russian, Latvian and Swedish. Finnish, Hungarian and Estonian are the best known of the Finno-Ugric languages; rather less known are the following smaller languages of the same language group: South Estonian, Votic, Livonian, Ingrian, Veps, Karelian, Sami, Erzya, Moksha, Mari, Udmurt and Komi, spoken from Scandinavia to Siberia. The relations between languages can often be seen from the similarities in numeric systems:

Estonian differs from its closest large related language, Finnish, at least as much as English differs from Frisian. The difference between Estonian and Hungarian is about as significant as between German and Persian.

Along with Icelandic, Estonian is at present one of the smallest languages in the world that fulfils all the functions necessary for an independent state to 'perform' linguistically. Teaching, at both primary school and university level, is in Estonian; it is also the language of modern science (molecular biology, astronomy, computer science, semiotics, etc.). Estonian is used in the army, in the theatre, aviation, journalism - in all walks of life. Estonian is the only official language in Estonia in local government and state institutions.

Estonian is spoken by approximately 1 100 000 people throughout the world. About 950 000 of them live in Estonia, and more than 150 000 are scattered over Sweden, Canada, USA, Russia, Australia, Finland, Germany and other countries. The first attempts to describe the Estonian language scientifically were undertaken in the early 17th century. In 1803, a lectureship of the Estonian language was established at what was then the German-language University of Tartu, founded in 1632. With the spread of the ideas of Enlightenment, the interest of the Baltic German Estophiles in the local language and culture increased. During the 19th century, the first educated Estonians began publishing scholarly research of their mother tongue. The first doctor of the Finno-Ugric languages of Estonian origin was Mihkel Veske who did research into the history of the Estonian language in the 1870s; the Estonian Writers' Union, established in 1871, undertook the task of standardising the common language. "

Hunger

2007-08-14T14:23:00.000-07:00

I read it with relish, I started on Sunday and finished this morning (Tues.) on BART, on my way to work. I felt uncomfortable reading it while having breakfast. I felt deranged while reading it at a full cafe in Berkeley on a Monday afternoon. I walked by two or more cafes, filled with Berkeley students studying diligently for the summer semester. When I finished the book, I wondered if all my readings of such depraved characters were going to drive me to lunacy. I guess we will find out, since I do not see myself eliminating such literature from my reading list any time soon.

Here's one excerpt I found when I randomly opened the book, it is tame, comparatively.

"Not a sound came to disturb me-the soft dark had hidden the whole world from me, and buried me in a wonderful peace- only the desolate voice of stillness sounded monotonously in my ear. And the dark monsters out there wanted to pull me to themselves as soon as night came, and they wanted to take me far far over seas and through strange lands where no human being lives. " -Hunger Knut Hamsun

Here's a New Yorker article on Hamsun from December 2005:

"...Isaac Bashevis Singer argued that "the whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun, just as Russian literature in the nineteenth century ‘came out of Gogol’s greatcoat.’ ” In Scandinavia, though, Hamsun meant trouble. During those months in Copenhagen, I occasionally walked into one of the antiquarian bookstores that could be found all over the city’s Latin Quarter. Several times when I asked about Hamsun’s works, the man behind the counter (it was always a man) would shake his head and declare, “He was a traitor!” I’d try to remember the shop so as not to embarrass myself again."

ghastly, indeed

2007-08-08T13:45:00.000-07:00

More clues about Europe before the World Wars, about the maps above: 1. Europe roughly after the Congress of Vienna 2. The corresponding language groups. From this website.

Congress of Vienna, on October 2, 1814

"What struck them first was the light. Sixteen thousand candles and thirty-two chandeliers lit up two ballrooms in the imperial palace, where the glass windowpanes had been replaced with mirrors, redoubling the splendor.

Geographically, the problem at Vienna was roughly the same as the one facing the Allies at Potsdam in 1945. Russia, which bore the brunt of the war against Napoleon, had marched its armies across Europe and was now effectively in control of Poland and much of Prussia. Alexander, who had a messianic dream of restoring Poland to the map as a kingdom under his control, refused to give back the parts of Poland that had formerly belonged to Prussia. As a result, Prussia sought compensation to the west, demanding to annex the independent kingdom of Saxony. Austria, meanwhile, under the wily conservative Metternich, hoped to maintain a balance of power, to rein in Alexander's ambitions, and to keep Prussia from dominating the smaller German states. It was a thoroughly unedifying spectacle, in which the great powers swapped cities and provinces like horse-traders, while the claims of small nations were ruthlessly ignored."

"Indeed, the Walser tone, hovering between beatific quietism and a burlesque of conventionality, is detectable in the immortal reply he gave a man who visited him at an asylum and asked about his writing: 'I am not here to write, but to be mad.'"

"Nancy Cunard paid a high price for her nonconformity. She was disinherited, arrested, beaten, institutionalized and eventually declared insane. Her legacy includes her refusal to regret, or attempt to explain, any of it.

Cunard was like "some invention, ghastly or not, of her own.... She didn't fit anywhere." That inconsistency or "passionate inconstancy," as William Carlos Williams called it, consisted of, as one male friend described it, "baffling contradictions"--she was passionate but unromantic, loyal but unforgiving, unconventional but fastidious, emotional but unsentimental, hedonistic but anorexic. Huxley summed her up as "one of those women who have the temperament of a man." Ghastly indeed."

"Characters die from humiliation in Max Ophuls or, to put it cruelly, they die from frustration. {…}Absorbed totally in passion, nothing else exists, as Stendhal says again, and frustrated passion crystallizes like crazy, becomes obsession, and dominates us totally. {…}Passion makes us prisoners first, then criminals."

Then, in the interest of getting away......

"The problems started when I put down my fork. Unable to find it among the plates, wine glasses, and baskets of bread, I resorted to shovelling steak into my mouth by hand - but I didn't worry about offending the well-mannered Parisians seated nearby. They couldn't see a thing."

Books read in July

2007-08-06T16:48:00.000-07:00

Books I read in July and why I read them.

1. Bâtarde- Violette Leduc

I read this essay in Context, a newsletter which I would pick up for free in Diesel Bookstore. I was seduced into the sensual and emotionally overwrought material this novel/memoir promised to cover. Since the book was out of print, I did not expect to easily come across it, so I kept it in the back of my mind as a book to keep an eye out for. On one of my rare Green Apple visits, I wandered around, and there was Bâtarde, tottering on top of a haphazard, yet standing, pile of books. Thus, there, I purchased it. It took me another few years to get around to reading it. The book's heft and personal subject kept me at an arm's length.

It was not as good as I wanted it to be. But I'm beginning to think this is the theme of my life, perhaps it can be my epitaph: "It was never as good as she wanted it to be." Sadly, I won't have a grave, or a gravestone, maybe it can be carved into a plaque above my favourite haunt.

There are beautifully written moments in this work: including a fantastic passage describing an endive salad and her enticing account of her black-marketing during WWII.
Most of the time, however, I felt mucked down by her barrage of emotional tumult.

I was having lunch at a Chinese restaurant one day, reading the book intently, trying to finish it. A man who was dining next to me asked me how the book was. My answer:" It's like being in a relationship you want out of, but you are committed to the end." That is how I felt about reading La Bâtarde, after 187 pages I felt committed, but I was quite relieved when it ended.

2. A Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert Heinlein

This book has somehow stayed with me despite the great book purge of 2005, when I had to move, and I rid myself of at least a few huge boxes of books. I must have picked it up for free from some giveaway pile because it is a cheap, grungy little paperback. I'm not even sure what could have compelled me to pick it up in the first place. I really didn't know anything about this book or the author. I decided to read it after seeing it in a book called 1001 Books You Should Read Before You Die, which, by the way, I don't agree with all the choices. Since I had Stranger around, I thought I would at least read it so I could get rid of it.

It is not too bad for a dated science-fiction utopian paperback. The dialogue conveys the characters well, but the free-love, cult storyline chippers into martyr-fantasy cheesiness. There are some novels where the writer's desired take on reality gets worn on the page; this novel is such an example.

3. Three Years- Anton Chekhov

I was delusional enough to think I might start reading Don Quixote this summer. So I ambled to my local library to check it out. While I was in the C's, I saw this slim novelette by Chekhov, since I had read another of his small novels (Story of Nobody) I knew I would enjoy it, plus I could read it easily in case the Cervantes fell through (which it did). But I will read Don Quixote before I die, even if I die while reading it. It is my folly, this desire to read the greatest novels of all time. Plus I feel rather embarrassed that I have not read it yet, I can't even believe I'm admitting it here.

Chekhov writes about disappointment and mundane life, but he does it without sentiment. He says a lot in a little amount of pages, it inspires me.

4. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers

Again, I was in another public library, this time in Berkeley. I decided that I wanted to read another book by Moravia, on passing through, I came across McCullers' book, and on an impulse I decided to check it out as well. I think I heard of this McCullers' book because it is #17 on the MLA, and as I mentioned before, I'm a sucker for those listed books. For the record, it is not in the 1001 Books, so I think it has lost some of its appeal through time, after all it was published in 1941 when McCullers was only 23.

It does have some juvenile character developments; it feels as though Mc Cullers wanted to bring all the misfits she could imagine together in a sleepy Southern town. The misfits have so much to say that it is bursting right out of them but they are unwilling to listen.

Overall, July was not as productive as I would have liked, hopefully August will be a better read.

lacuna

2007-08-03T14:19:00.000-07:00

Ok- That's it, everyone can packup and leave now.

Interactions like that make me want to move to Belgium and never talk to anyone and never know anyone ever again. And there are some who want to make it seem a lot better than it ever could be:

“I struggled to come to terms with this new knowledge,” Goodall later wrote. She would wake in the night, haunted by the memory of witnessing a female chimpanzee gorging on the flesh of an infant, “her mouth smeared with blood like some grotesque vampire from the legends of childhood.”

nocturnes

2007-08-01T12:30:00.001-07:00

I encountered a strange and sad story yesterday, which fits the overall uncanniness of this week, another and another.

Curious blog exchange with the deceased.

Things I've been thinking about:

1. The intellectual history of books.

2. Western history, especially how the events that caused WWI which led us to our current state. I started reading Jacques Barzun's Dawn to Decadence to hopefully enlighten me. I have to say, his writing style is quite peculiar and it has taken time for me to adjust to it.

3. The taxonomy of friendships and that very fluid nature of intimacy

4. The subjective appreciation and naming conventions of colors-example: When is mauve a mauve?

5. Nocturnes- an excerpt from Grove Music:

"A piece suggesting night, usually quiet and meditative in character, but not invariably so. The Italian term Notturno occurs frequently as a title in 18th-century music, but the French form of the word was not used until John Field applied it to some lyrical piano pieces written between about 1812 and 1836 Field’s nocturnes are historically important as antecedents of Chopin’s. The writing is clearly idiomatic, exploiting the sounds available on the newer pianos; the sustaining pedal, in particular, enabled Field to expand the range of the harmonic accompanying patterns beyond those of the Alberti bass, which of necessity lay under the hand. The melodies of his nocturnes transferred to the keyboard the cantilena of Italian opera, to which he had been exposed in Russia in the early 1800s (see ex.1). According to Liszt, who wrote a preface to the first collected edition of Field’s nocturnes (Leipzig, 1859), they ‘opened the way for all the productions which have since appeared under the various titles of Songs without Words, Impromptus, Ballades, etc., and to him we may trace the origin of pieces designed to portray subjective and profound emotion’.
Although the emotional range of most of Field’s nocturnes is not wide, and the phrase structure sometimes tediously predictable, the restrained elegance of his musical language and imaginative keyboard figuration made a great impression on subsequent Romantic composers, especially Chopin, who admired both Field’s playing and his compositions. Nocturnes were composed by most pianist-composers of the time, including Liszt (whose famous Liebesträume song transcriptions were subtitled ‘nocturnes’), Schumann (Nachtstücke op.23), J.B. Cramer, Czerny, Kalkbrenner, Thalberg, Henri Bertini and Theodor Döhler among them. Chopin’s 21 nocturnes, however, hold a pre-eminent place in the history of the genre. The celebrated Nocturne in E♭ op.9 no.2 is perhaps the most similar to Field’s nocturnes, showing the influence of two of his nocturnes in the same key in both melody and accompaniment patterns. It was, however, Field’s Nocturne no.4 in A major, with its agitated, harmonically more complex, central section, that proved more inspirational for Chopin’s expansion of the form in his op.9 no.3 and later pieces.
Chopin’s nocturnes (especially op.48 no.1) display an intensity well beyond the range of Field and a high degree of melodic invention (ex.2). His remarkable harmonic sophistication, too, is often couched in keyboard textures of a contrapuntal complexity that never seems redundant or forced. Moreover, several diverge from Field’s basic ABA formal outline. The otherwise suave op.32 no.1 in B major ends unexpectedly in B minor with an abrupt, recitative-like coda that appears in emotional terms to contradict all that has gone before, while op.15 no.3 in G minor is in a highly unusual AB form with no recapitulation of the initial material.
Although the apogee of the pianistic nocturne was reached with Chopin, it continued to be a popular genre. French composers were particularly attracted to the form: Fauré wrote 13 nocturnes, and Satie, d’Indy and Poulenc contributed to the repertory. Liszt’s late works include the nocturne En rêve (1885) and celebrated nocturnes were also composed by Glinka, Balakirev, Tchaikovsky (op.10 no.1 in F major and op.19 no.4 in C♯ minor), Rimsky-Korsakov (Nocturne in D minor), Skryabin and Grieg (Notturno in C major op.54 no.4). Nocturnes were also written for orchestra; a well-known example is in Mendelssohn’s incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where the tone-colour of the horn is used, as in the 18th-century notturno, to evoke the image of night. Bizet wrote an unpublished nocturne for orchestra, and Debussy’s Trois nocturnes (Nuages, Fêtes and Sirènes, the last with a female wordless chorus) are among the finest achievements of French impressionist music; Fêtes, a vigorously rhythmic and extrovert piece, considerably expands the usual associations of the term ‘nocturne’ to portray nocturnal festivities."

Three Years

2007-07-27T12:21:00.001-07:00

"Yes, everything under the sun comes to an end," he said quietly, screwing up his dark eyes. "You'll fall in love and you'll suffer, fall out of love and you'll be deceived, because there isn't a woman that won't deceive you, you'll suffer, fall into despair and you yourself will deceive. But the time will come, when all this will be just a memory, and you'll reason coldly, and consider it trivial…"

-Anton Chekhov Three Years

idle matter

2007-07-25T10:31:00.000-07:00

I'm bored, I've been bored for the last month, I do not know why. I am engaged in daily activities which make me feel satisfied, but I feel that I am somehow infected with a taedium vitae. I think I might need take a class, or to change jobs, or move to another country. Today, I thought of some "titles", in attempts to humor myself:

1. Exercises in Tragedy
2. How to Complete the Unspeakable
3. Experiencing Unnecessary Boredom

Then I searched "idle chatter" on google and found this strange thing:

"Why does Tim Hawkinson like to play with himself so much? Why does he goof around with his own body, measuring it and categorizing it? Why does he make such beautiful little things with the detritus that falls from it? Why does he make such charming and amusing things at all?"

and from the New Yorker:

"Weird week. Weird, weird week, passing from alert orange to heavenly white and back to the usual muddle of slush. People keep trying to "gauge public opinion" at this moment of crisis. Fortunately, though, in the past year in New York we've had on hand a machine that can tell you what the world is thinking—that actually listens to the world, reads its mind, and tells you exactly what's up in there. The machine, a Jimmy Neutron assemblage of display monitors and loudspeakers and copper wire, is the brainchild of a Bell Labs statistician named Mark Hansen and a sound designer and artist named Ben Rubin, and for most of the past year you could find it in a loft on the Bowery, where you could drop in on it if you knew it was there. For the past couple of months, though, it has been on loan to the Whitney Museum of American Art, and in a rough week it was a pleasure to sit in the dark and listen."

And just for fun, I searched "colorfields" in the New Yorker and found this:

"At a boozy dinner party that I attended in a New York walkup nearly thirty years ago, a woman announced that she was getting married. Joan Mitchell, who was there, exploded. How could anyone even think of doing something so bourgeois? The buzzer sounded. It was Mitchell's longtime lover, the French-Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle. He wanted to speak to her, but he wouldn't come upstairs. From the landing, she told him in scorching terms to leave her alone. Back at the table, she resumed denouncing the insidiousness of marriage as a trap for free souls. The buzzer again. Another cascade of profanity down the stairwell. I was awed. Here was craziness of a scary and rare order. Those who knew Joan Mitchell pass these kinds of stories around like sacred-monster trading cards. But Mitchell's personality was one thing, and her art is entirely another."

Another dull day saved by New Yorker randomness..........

Picture July

2007-07-22T17:38:00.000-07:00

Big City Orchestra
View from Angel Island towards Tiburon, July 4th, 2007
Tree bark, Angel Island, July 4th, 2007
Chocolate Salon, San Francisco

Europe

2007-07-18T10:40:00.000-07:00

I found it interesting to see how much Europe has changed in the years. See this map from 1470? See how huge Lithuania is and how present day Spain is actually four "kingdoms": Castille, Granda, Navarre and Aragon, yet there is no mention of the Basque country.

map from Wiki

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/Europe_in_1470.png

Now here's a map of Europe right before WWI. No Lithuania in sight and Spain has been unified, and Austria-Hungary dominates Europe, but we know how that changes. Time to hit the history books to see how this all comes about.

Strange Bedfellows

2007-07-13T12:23:00.000-07:00

F. Scott Fitzgerald influenced Hunter S. Thompson?-Believe it! (from The New Yorker 3/7/2005)

He {Thompson} also seems, by virtue of the “outlaw” accoutrements, to belong to the tradition in American writing that includes William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Henry Miller. But his true model and hero was F. Scott Fitzgerald. He used to type out pages from “The Great Gatsby,” just to get the feeling, he said, of what it was like to write that way, and Fitzgerald’s novel was continually on his mind while he was working on “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” which was published, after a prolonged and agonizing compositional nightmare, in 1972.

Speaking of Thompson- a little known LSD Maverick

How I spend my week:

I spent this week (except for work and roommates) alone. I find that I enjoy this solitude tremendously.I think I am going to replace my friends with habits. At least with habits I feel more productive; habits include: running, reading, learning, (many things but mostly history, literature, and possibly a few foreign languages), writing, and practicing piano. I also find that I enjoy watching films at PFA, so last night I viewed a double feature. This, I have never done before, I never thought I had the endurance to watch two films in a row, but I surprised myself. It was part of the Barbara Stanwyck program, I saw two films directed by Douglas Sirk, starring, of course, Stanwyck. It turns out that Monday, July 16 is Stanwyck's 100th birthday. "All in all, as Sugarpuss says, 'Pretty good getting, for a gal that came up the hard way.'” The New Yorker wrote a good article a few months ago on Stanwyck which the two films I saw were mentioned:

"Even Douglas Sirk, the master colorist, stuck to black-and-white when he hired Stanwyck for two of her final melodramas, “All I Desire” and “There’s Always Tomorrow” (1956). Sirk found in her “an amazing tragic stillness,” while praising her discretion: “She gets every point, every nuance without hitting on anything too heavily.” The closeup of her tears, in the first of those films, as her character walks up the path to her family home, to the sound of violins, should be the merest hokum, yet it stirs us like the last dying echo from the age of Garbo. And remember: Stanwyck herself never had a family home."

Now looking forward to a weekend of habits.

Lost Coast

2007-07-11T10:49:00.001-07:00

These are pictures taken of the Black Sand beach on the Lost Coast in northern California. They were taken in June 2003 on my only visit there. I've read about it for a few years before I actually was able to visit the area, sadly I was there only for a few hours when we were coming down from Arcata back to the Bay Area. The Lost Coast is 80 miles of shoreline starting just north of Rockport where Highway 1 turns inland to connect with Highway 101. There is only one road that leads back into the coast; it is the road into Shelter Cove.

There are days which I would love to disappear into a vast and dispassionate landscape. I would get swept up in the view of the sea. I would forget names and spend my days wandering. The only sounds I would hear would be the ocean and its inhabitants. Someday I would like to go back.

word of the day

2007-07-05T10:46:00.000-07:00

Dear Reader, (maybe I should start all my posts this way)

The word of the day on July 4, 2007 was phantasmagoria, curious, is it not? And here is the example sentence:

"The new writings more and more take the form of apocalypses -- that is, of supernatural visions which reveal past, present and future under the guise of a phantasmagoria of symbolic persons and animals, divine and diabolical beings, celestial and infernal phenomena."-- Edmund Wilson, The Dead Sea Scrolls: 1947-1969

In other New Yorker news, last night I read this magnificent set of adjectives describing Klaus Kinski- "...gifted but satanically mercurial star..." in a April 2006 Profile on Werner Herzog. I'm sure I could be described as satanically mercurial during specific times in my life, but not gifted, sadly.

And more about Herzog:

“I am always being stopped at airports by drug-interdiction officials,” he said, with satisfaction. “There is something about my face that is sinister.” The aura is heightened by his sonorous voice, which, in his heavily accented English, suggests a Teutonic Vincent Price. Herzog likes to say that he is “clinically sane and completely professional,” but he is keenly aware that his reputation is otherwise—“One of the most persistent rumors plaguing me is that I’m a crazy director doing crazy things”—and he is fascinated by the myriad ways that people form this impression.

Fun things to do when you are bored: type in a random word or phrase into the New Yorker search box and see what pops up. For example, if you type in "murder", you may get this article.

"The murderer can’t find a parking space. A hard morning spent murdering people, and now this. He has errands to run, the murderer. What a week he’s had, and it’s only Thursday. Just look at his schedule:

Monday murder somebody
Tuesday murder somebody
Wednesday sit around
Thursday murder somebody; do errands"

This may be one of a few things that make the United States an interesting country, from a June 25, 2007 article in the New Yorker.

"Orchestras at the level of the Nashville used to be described as “regional” or “second tier,” but increasingly they display the virtuoso panache of front-rank ensembles. The conservatories are producing wave after wave of almost excessively skilled players, and, like Ph.D.s in the humanities, hundreds of them fan out across the continent each year in search of jobs. They may stay with a regional orchestra for only a season or two before moving on to a higher salary, but they raise the level of playing as they go. A well-travelled soloist recently told me that players are often better than the conductors who lead them."

La Bâtarde

2007-07-02T11:34:00.000-07:00

"You can guess, reader, you have already guessed, it is the end of a love affair, it is the end of tyranny. Love. Love has no end. If it had, it would not be love. We go on loving those we have loved in other forms, or else we begin to cherish in other forms those we should have loved in the past. Nothing changes, everything is transformed."

-Violette Leduc

Maybe, at the end of the day, all I need is a good dosage of this: New Drug Deletes Bad Memories

the rest of June books

2007-06-28T11:57:00.000-07:00

Books read for June for fiction-only summer, 2007 with short, very short discussions.

1. Started: 6/8/2007 Finished 6/13/2007
Despair, by Vladimir Nabokov

Mixed into a story of finding one's double, belies some Nabokovian treatises on art and duplicity. The narrator attempts the pefect murder under the guise of suicide. He is perceptually flawed, since he does not have the objectivity to see if the double he has selected can really pass for himself. The authorities reveal his crime as defective. Nabokov somehow entertwins some ideas on literary criticism parallelling with the presses persecution treatment of the murder within the story.

Should you read it? Yes, if you like Nabokov and/or if you like stories of psychologically questionable characters.

2. Started 6/13/2007 Finished 6/16/2007
Contempt, by Alberto Moravia

Obssessive story of a man's loss of his wife's love. The narrator, a writer, sells himself out by writing screenplays instead of the works he was inspired to do. He blames his wife's need for a house and other material necessities which drove him to write for money instead of writing for art. We never know the wife's perspective, all we learn about the relationship is completely based on his interpretation. As the story unfolds, the reader learns that the narrator is not to be trusted, but in fact he misunderstands and misinterprets many scenes.The language obscures the narrator's growing mania, since the story is written in an analytical and detached manner.

Should you read it? Yes, if you like to peer into the dark mind of the psychologically spurious, (see also, above book) and if you like to read about a relationship slowly going to hell.

3. Started 6/17/2007 Finished 6/18/2007
Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë

Gripping Victorian love story of a unloved orphan (Jane Eyre) and her eventual, but tantalizing falling in love with the Byronic (i.e. tragic & brooding) "hero", Mr Rochester. Along the way, she acquires a good education, develops ladylike qualities, becomes a governess and a teacher, and inherits some money from a long lost uncle.There's a mad woman in the attic which disrupts some marriage plans, and second marriage proposal, just to keep things lively.

Should you read it? Yes, if you like gripping Victorian romances written by previously underappreciated women writers.

4. Started 6/18/2007 finished 6/21/2007
Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad

Nefarious collision tale between civilization and barbarism and the madness that imperialism and colonialism produces. Marlow sneaks up the Congo to track down the elusive and diabolical Kurtz. Classic novel focusing on the construction of "the other".

Should you read it? Yes, if you are fascinated by Coppola's Apocalypse Now and Herzog's Aguirre,Wrath of God and if you want to know the origin of that quote: "the horror, the horror".

5. Started 6/22/2007 Finished 6/23/2007
Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife, by Sam Savage

A book eating rat becomes literate and devours classics while holing up in a bookstore. The rat observes humans from afar, and seems to love them despite their foibles. A depressed and drunken science fiction writer gives the rat some moments of happiness and love. All the while, Boston gentrifies.

Should you read it? Yes, if you want to read one of the bloggers' buzz favourite ficiton, or if you like rat tales.

math minded

2007-06-26T16:40:00.001-07:00

Last night I read this great New Yorker article about a Russian mathematician, Grigory Perelman, who may have solved the Poincaré conjecture. The Poincaré conjecture as described by Wikipedia.

And an excerpt from the article, Manifold Destiny, from an August 2006 New Yorker, I most likely picked it up from some library magazine giveaway stack, as I am wont to do:

Mikhail Gromov, the Russian geometer, said that he understood Perelman’s logic: “To do great work, you have to have a pure mind. You can think only about the mathematics. Everything else is human weakness. Accepting prizes is showing weakness.” Others might view Perelman’s refusal to accept a Fields as arrogant, Gromov said, but his principles are admirable. “The ideal scientist does science and cares about nothing else,” he said. “He wants to live this ideal. Now, I don’t think he really lives on this ideal plane. But he wants to.”

modified heart-break haiku

2007-06-22T12:29:00.001-07:00

Was I so difficult for you?

Many questions

better off silent.

Here lies an atheist, All dressed up, And no place to go

2007-06-20T11:45:00.000-07:00

In the war on religion: Religions = ∞ atheism =4

I'm still on the side of atheism anyway.

from the article:

Blaise Pascal wrote that "men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction." Napoleon thought religion "keeps the poor from murdering the rich." Freud regarded religions as "mass delusions."

Konner's choices also remind us that Bible-bashing is next to godliness among atheists. Issac Asimov viewed the Bible as "the most potent force for atheism ever conceived." Paine described it as "a book of lies and contradictions," "the work of a demon" more than "the word of God," and denounced its "obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries . . . the unrelenting vindictiveness."

Voltaire shared Paine's disapproval, defining the Bible as "what fools have written, what imbeciles command, what rogues teach." Leading 19th-century American atheist Robert Ingersoll castigated it for presenting a God who upholds slavery, commands soldiers to kill women and babies, supports polygamy, persecutes people for their opinions, and punishes unbelievers forever.

I know one thing, no matter how dressed up I am, I do not ever want to go to a wedding, or have one!

article:

About a dozen years ago, an old friend of mine was told by his daughter that she was going to get married. This suited him fine, but he balked at pouring untold thousands of dollars down the drain of a full-dress wedding. "I'll tell you what," he said to her. "I'll give you a choice: You can have a wedding, or you can have $30,000 to help you get started on your new life." Without a moment's hesitation, she astonished him -- and me, too, when he told me the story -- by replying, "I'll take the wedding."

obiter dictum

2007-06-19T08:47:00.000-07:00

If someone wants to know you, they will ask questions and listen to the answers. How rare the questions are asked.

"A memory is a beautiful thing, it's almost a desire that you miss."
Gustave Flaubert

F&@! Frank Gehry?

2007-06-15T11:39:00.000-07:00

Some New Yorker tidbits~

Barnaby Harris made some t-shirts with F**k Frank Gehry on it. Mr. Gehry found out, and this is what happened: As reported in the New Yorker, 6-4-2007

an excerpt

"Within days, a sample batch was on its way to Gehry’s office.

'Somebody sent it to me,' Gehry said the other day, over the telephone, 'and I thought it must have been the people in Brooklyn who are sort of angry. But then I thought, well, it must be loving, too. So I decided it was funny, and I put it on. And I wore it to the office, and everybody got a kick out of that, and then I wore it to the gym'—Gehry lifts weights at a Gold’s in Venice Beach—"and everybody got a kick out of that. The tough gals at the gym said, ‘If it’s an offer, you better be able to deliver, Mr. Gehry.’ ” Gehry’s wife, Berta, found this all funny. (“She’s Panamanian, so she doesn’t get rattled by much,” Gehry said.) In a Queer Nationesque move of appropriation, Gehry decided to begin sending the shirts out as gifts.

And another tidbit from the New Yorker 5-28-2007

"The latest stunt-eating politico is Eric Gioia, a city councilman from Queens. Last week, he concluded a Food Stamp Challenge, during which he ate only what a New Yorker could typically afford on a week’s worth of food stamps, or the equivalent of twenty-eight dollars.
'I did this to draw attention to the issue of how people are living in New York City,' Gioia said the other day, in his parents’ kitchen, in Woodside. 'It’s been terrible. I feel lousy. I’m tired. I just don’t feel like myself.'

…Gioia did not look for loopholes. For instance, he didn’t scrounge free condiments at fast-food restaurants, as Homer Simpson might do. At the office, he drank water from the bathroom faucet rather than from the cooler. But public life has its snares, and during a gala at the Museum of Modern Art last Tuesday, after he waved away a plate of veal Milanese and asked for a glass of tap water, he inadvertently drank some Pellegrino—a violation he claims to have discovered only when the bubbles tickled his throat. He was seated next to David Childs, the architect, and gazed longingly at Childs’s raspberry dessert. 'These raspberries cost more than your whole week,' Childs told him."

After Dark, Days and Nights

2007-06-12T12:45:00.000-07:00

This summer is my read-novels-only season, here are the first two I've read so far. There is no method or order to the books I have chosen to read. I am simply dictated by random book lust, sporadic book reviews I've read, and some books leading to other books.

Alfred Jarry Days and Nights
I read this book a few years ago, but I decided to read again to see if I could make any more sense of it this time around. If it was any longer than its slim 130+ pages, it would've have taken me a month to read it. This contradicts one's intuition, since, on the surface it appears easy to read. The book is broken into a number of very short chapters, but one must be aware of the style which can slacken the reader. Days and Nights is a satiristic autobiography of Jarry's Sisphyean military stint. But acquiring a linear story would be near impossible, since the novel weaves in and out of hallucination and interior streams. The point of reading it, would be to immerse yourself in Jarry's strange, word-ordered universe. It's a work that presages the non-linear, stream-of-consciouness often found in modernist writers: Joyce, Faulker, Burroughs, and etc.

Haruki Murakami After Dark
I have never read any Murakami's books, but I became obssessed with the need to read After Dark when I read a review. What struck me most is the point of view within the book. The reader is a "neutral outside witness" spoken to by a comforting, semi-omniscent speaker. We see it as though we are looking through the camera lens, swooping down on the characters' actions and conversations. Most of what we do learn about the characters are revealed by themselves in conversation. But we never really get to see or understand what motivates the character, or what is happening emotionally within. The characters are likeable, yet they remain opaque. The language is simple but not simplistic and the pacing moves ahead with out feeling rushed; Basically it's a fun to read novel: entertaining, not very thought-provoking and kind of strange.

Here are some real reviews:

After Dark-
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/books/review/Kirn-t.html?ex=1181793600&en=9bdb0c36525b565a&ei=5070

and on another blog-
http://www.themillionsblog.com/2007/05/rootless-detachment-review-of-after.html
which the reader thought more about the book than I did. I haven't read enough Murakami to agree or not, however I can see some of these points after reading this novel, and I was not really compelled to read another Murakami novel soon, if ever. I doubt I will remember much about After Dark a year from now, except I may remember that is was strange. An excerpt:

"The problem confronting Murakami's readers has always been that, despite his otherworldly talents, he has nothing to say. Nothing of any real interest or significance, at least. Although his stories often hint at a metaphysics of unreality, the books are mostly surface and, unlike one of his professed influences, Raymond Carver, seem to lack any insight into the human condition (or any other condition, really). Instead, they content themselves with cataloging the discontents of the modern age, particularly the alarmingly numerous forms of ennui, all of which, after three or four volumes, begin to bear a striking resemblance to one another.

While this was all well and good when Murakami started his career, with After Dark it seems he has become so enamored of his own abilities that he has ceased to care whether what he has chosen to show us actually matters. Or is even interesting. The more I read Murakami, the less his work resembles genius, and the more it comes to resemble a symptom of autism or obsessive compulsion. As Murakami translator Jay Rubin notes in his biography Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, around the time Murakami finished A Wild Sheep Chase, he began to obsess over his writing, fearing that he might die before finishing the book, a thought he apparently found untenable. His anxiety led to a major overhaul of his life. He quit smoking, began to exercise regularly, changed his diet. Over time, his books have come to reflect this obsession with writing and not necessarily in a positive way. As Rubin explains it, Murakami works not because he has an idea for a book, but because he feels compelled to write. It's suggested that he often sits at his desk, writing whatever comes to mind, until the glimmerings of a story appear. Those who are familiar with Murakami's novels can see this process at work. Often, the first fifty to one hundred pages of his books feature characters loafing around, looking for something to do, a reflection, perhaps, of Murakami's own mental state. The result is a presumably faithful depiction of his inner life with an ironic lack of self-awareness."

Days and Nights. by Harvey Pekar.
The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1993 v13 n2 p257(2)
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1993 Review of Contemporary Fiction

When the major modernist writers are listed, Alfred Jarry is often excluded, forgotten about, and yet what a tremendous impact on modernism he had. Dadaism, surrealism, and absurdism were all derived from his work. In addition to this, much of his writing is very enjoyable and stimulating to read. Maybe that's part of the trouble: not enough people read him, a major reason being that his books are very difficult to find. Congratulations, then, are in order to Atlas for publishing so much of it recently. Many historians and critics seem to underrate Jarry as a technician and intellect. In his twenties he was already pretty well-read in several areas including science, religion, mythology, history, and contemporary politics. As a very young man he'd already been a coeditor with Remy de Gourmont of L'Ymaginiev, "which published and analyzed ... medieval and popular prints, usually of a religious nature," according to Alastair Brotchie's helpful introduction. The play Caesar Antichrist, Jarry's second book (1895), was illustrated as well as written by him. In it there is a good deal of theoretical information about the discipline or quasi-discipline he created, pataphysics. Opposites and their tendency to neutralize each other, thus, in his opinion, eventually amounting to the same thing, get considerable attention here. Caesar Antichrist claims, "I and the Christ are Janus." In the midst of abstract dialogues involving Christ, Caesar Antichrist, and Saint Peter, Jarry inserts a condensation of his humorous, earthy Ubu Roi play, which was to be performed in 1896 (it had been done with marionettes as early as 1888). This is done not only to shock, but to set up a contrast between it and other sections of the play, in accordance with Jarry's theory of opposites. Days and Nights, Jarry's first novel, appeared in 1897. An autobiographical work, it deals with his thirteen months in the army (he was drafted) and his method of securing a medical discharge so that he did not have to serve his entire three-year stretch. Jarry (he calls himself Sengle here) had a friend who showed him various ways to deceive doctors into thinking he was sicker than he was, such as sticking a thermometer under his armpit to make his temperature appear unusually high. Part of his novel is devoted to criticizing the army and military medicine; a lot of this is funny. Other chapters are devoted to his dreams and hallucinations; Jarry got high a lot on alcohol and drugs, so they are pretty vivid. Jarry comes across as a likeable character, a lot less weird than some accounts of him would lead you to believe. For one thing, his beefs about the military are pretty much like other soldiers' and can easily be identified with. His methods of getting out of work and goofing off have plenty in common with Sergeant Bilko's; that's a definite plus. Alastair Brotchie, whose introductions and notes in both books are quite astute and useful, implies that Jarry influenced James Joyce, an interesting observation. On one hand, Joyce's work can be accounted for without Jarry; he was influenced by French symbolist poetry (as was Jarry) and the pre-1900 stream-of-consciousness work of Eduard Dujardin and George Moore, plus Moore's post-1900 "melodic line" style. But Jarry at least anticipated Joyce in several ways: both employed complex symbolism, both devoted a great deal of attention to interior states, such as dreams, both used sentence fragments and free association of ideas, and both employed wordplay, including neologisms. In any event, very few writers marked twentieth-century literature as strongly as Jarry. His work should be taught in universities along with Joyce's, Eliot's and Pound's, and it should be realized that there is more to his oeuvre than the Ubu plays, as the innovative prose writing in Days and Nights, The Supermale, and Dr. Faustroll make abundantly clear.

Antikythera Mechanism

2007-06-07T11:12:00.000-07:00

This summer: presenting strange discoveries from my readings.

From Wikipedia:

The Antikythera mechanism (Greek: O μηχανισμός των Αντικυθήρων, O mēchanismós tōn Antikythērōn) is believed by many to be an ancient mechanical analog computer (as opposed to most computers today which are digital computers) designed to calculate astronomical positions. It was discovered in the Antikythera wreck off the Greek island of Antikythera, between Kythera and Crete, and has been dated to about 150-100 BC. It is especially notable for being a technological artifact with no known predecessor or successor; other machines using technology of such complexity would not appear until the 18th century.

I encountered this subject in a May 14, 2007 New Yorker article I read while I was in Dublin the third week of this past May. Pretty fascinating stuff.

Next- Murakami & A. Jarry novels.

Invader

2007-05-30T19:29:00.001-07:00

All these pictures of Invader were taken in Paris during May 2007:

Art is not an antidote; it is an invasion.

Off this summer to catch up on my New Yorkers, to read dozens of books, and to attempt to compose a novel.

Maybe later............

sycophant

2007-05-07T21:30:00.000-07:00

Cloud portraits over Walnut Creek~

I spent this weekend reading: I can't wait until I can leave for a while.

“Once, when someone asked him about his method of composition, Chekov picked up an ashtray. ‘This is my method of composition,’ he said, ‘Tomorrow I will write a story called ‘The Ashtray’.” –Francine Prose Reading Like a Writer.

“It seems to me that the writer should not try to solve such questions as those of God, pessimism, etc. His business is but to describe those who have been speaking or thinking about God and pessimism, how and under what circumstances. The artist should not be the judge of his characters and their conversations, but only an unbiased observer.” –Anton Chekov

punctilious compunctious

2007-05-01T22:09:00.000-07:00

Wow! Reading the emotional tumult of my last post simultaneously horrifies and amuses me. Then I realize that I must rise above myself to my true desired intellectual aspirations.

This past week I've been reading a strange collection of essays published in 1921, from a now near-forgotten writer. Reading these essays, I realize how my criticisms of this country have been aired 80 years ago.

“Our morality system has become a mechanical device for protecting us against ourselves; it is the handiwork of terror.”
“More and more our civilization is becoming a not a civilization of free men but of moral cowards.” - Harold Stearns “An Question of Morals” America and the Young Intellectuals

A New Yorker tidbit I ran into:

“Intelligence allied to honesty allied to wit is a powerful charm.” - Adam Gopnick- on Kingsley Amis, New Yorker 4-23-2007

This is a combination I aspire to, along with a dose of deep emotion thrown in. My sympathy always tied to my sardonic humor.

personal curiosity cabinet

2007-04-25T22:17:00.000-07:00

My birthday was last week and I thought of many things:

1. How memory can be organized like taxonomy or like a curiosity cabinet. Above are pictures of what would be in my personal curiosity cabinet, things which have a value only to me. I have an egg I found while I was a gardener, a bone found on a beach, a pipe-cleaner outlined heart, my cats' whiskers, some stones and pieces of glass, etc. These things evoke a memory, a meaning only accessible to me, yet valueless to the world. I used to think love was like that sometimes.

2. I'm actually quite glad that I will never have to deal with infatuation again. I wanted in life: someone smart and strange, someone who has a big heart, someone I can always trust and rely on, someone who engages my intellect, someone who is my best friend, someone who can share his life with me, someone who is comfortable being themselves with me and is comfortable letting me be myself around them. And I found that person. No matter what happens, or how life turns out, to have such an experience frees me. Even if I spend the rest of my life celibate and single, I will never feel alone.

3. There is a bitterness, though, that I must cure myself of. I felt alot for someone, then I realized that this feeling will never be reciprocated. I realized it was a shame to spend so much of life feeling this one-sided feeling. I never wanted to be a bitter person, yet I find that this bitter taste has not left me. I'm left with the bitter taste for empty feelings. It is useless.

4. About letters-something that used to give a us a window into a writer's mind- now disappeared. Then I thought about love letters. I guess it's better if your ex-lover returns your love letters than to throw it all away. If the loved can no longer feel the emotion expressed in the letter, at least you can remember the passion you felt. There is no ex-lover whose letters I can ever throw away. Those words mean alot to me. But perhaps I am alone this way.
It would be sad not to have slightest trace left. Love is never an easy thing to get over, I want to know that I felt this way once. A letter is the best gift I could ever receive. (he gave so little of himself) (MLG gave so much, more than anyone I've known, more than what I could ever expect).

5. I would like to be happy, for a change.

Easter Sunday 4-8 wanderings

2007-04-19T18:19:00.000-07:00

We wandered down Alcatraz Ave. heading westward into Emeryville. We strolled across the newly landscaped pathways of converted live-work type spaces and passed by new-industrial buildings, housing architectural firms, graphic designs offices and other such artsy-work things.
The landscape we traveled shifted from residences to businesses. We ended at Magic Garden Nursery, which was closed, and we crossed the train tracks to get a view of Aquatic park. And always, we heard the sound of cars in the background.

"The mistake made by all urbanists is to consider the private automobile (and its by-products like the motorcycle) essentially as a means of transportation. Such a misconception is a major expression of a notion of happiness that developed capitalism tends to spread throughout society. The automobile is the centerpiece of this general propaganda, both as sovereign good of an alienated life and as essential product of the capitalist market: This year we hear that American economic prosperity is soon going to depend on the success of the slogan "two cars per family." -Guy Debord Situationist Thesis on Traffic

word spills

2007-04-15T17:58:00.000-07:00

Sometimes,

I wish to never speak again, let all the wasted conversations dissolve into dissipated air.

I wish to gain enough distance between me and my past that I can only view it with a dispassionate calm.

I wish to spend my Sundays reading the New Yorker.

I wish not to feel so disturbed while reading Fitzgerald's biography.

I wish I could remember the things about you that made me feel so happy and to not forget the things about you that made me feel so sad.

I wish that my mind was lucid and precise, and that thinking was as easy as breathing.

I wish I could get enough sleep.

I wish I could remember all the words I really like and I wish I could use those words in perfectly formed sentences.

~instead of spilling words...

Thumper

2007-04-15T17:57:00.001-07:00

moveable

2007-04-13T20:21:00.000-07:00

RE: the painter, Pascin "He looked more like a Broadway character than the lovely painter that he was and afterwards, when he had hanged himself, I liked to remember him as he was that at that night at the Dôme. They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who makes jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure." -Ernest Hemingway A Moveable Feast

RE: F. Scott Fitzgerald "He had...a delicate long-lipped Irish mouth that, on a girl, would have been a mouth of a beauty. [...] The mouth worried you until you knew him then it worried you more." -Ernest Hemingway A Moveable Feast

my good-riddance friday

2007-04-06T18:10:00.000-07:00

some thoughts during the week:

A pessimist is a man who thinks all women are bad. An optimist is one who hopes they are.
--Chauncey Depew

"…the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald The Crack Up

"…I only wanted absolute quiet to think out why I had developed a sad attitude toward sadness, a melancholy attitude toward melancholy, and a tragic attitude toward tragedy- why I had become identified with the objects of my horror or compassion.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald Pasting it Together

Globe-trotting bartender, what a life!

An article I read last night, how we really fucked up in Iraq and still are fucking up, too bad.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/03/26/070326fa_fact_packer/

another 4/4 goes by

2007-04-04T15:02:00.000-07:00

a song that has been floating in my head-

you threaten to make me dead
and none of this will matter
or surface again

scares you to know that we won't bewatching the same sun
or brooding the same thoughts
in the same part of the world

scares me how you get older
how you forget about each other

things mean a lot at the time
don't mean nothing later

-Red House Painters

anchoress

2007-04-01T14:46:00.000-07:00

10. Time is a tyranny to be abolished.
-From the twelve propositions of transition magazine, Paris 1927-1938

"This being in love is great-you get a lot of compliments and begin to think you're a great guy."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald from Notebooks (The Crack-Up)

"When you get over an infatuation, to fall for someone ever again seems so inconceivable that you imagine no one, not even a bug, that is not mired in disappointment."
-E.M. Cioran Lure of Disillusion

floruit

2007-03-18T14:06:00.000-07:00

"We, amnesiacs all, condemned to live in an eternally fleeting present, have created the most elaborate of human constructions, memory, to buffer ourselves against the intolerable knowledge of the irreversible passage of time and the irretrievability of its moments and events." attributed to Geoffrey Sonnabend from Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder- Lawrence Wescher

Some random brainthought bubbles floating around in my head the last month or so:

Individualism has been sold to the Americans, like cheap, overpackaged plastic toys.

I hate the sound that my teeth make when they hit the edge of my glass when I drink.

There exists a restaurant jazz which splays into enough spazzy chaos to inspire spirited conversation amongst diners and servers, yet slides into a smoothness to allow pause for thoughtful tasting.

spleen and ideal

2007-02-14T15:43:00.000-08:00

~Does all romance end in tragedy, eventually?

~How can one withdraw from society without offending anyone?

~In sleep we are free...

Novel ideas

2007-02-12T16:53:00.000-08:00

"Every novel created with real passion aspires quite naturally to a lasting aesthetic value, meaning to a value capable of surviving its author. To write without having that ambition is cynicism: a mediocre plumber may be useful to people, but a mediocre novelist who consciously produced books that are ephemeral, commonplace, conventional -- thus non-useful, thus burdensome, thus noxious -- is contemptible. This is the novelist's curse: his honesty is bound to the vile stake of his megalomania."

Milan Kundera

blocking

2007-02-07T14:58:00.000-08:00

This week has been filled with disappointments, irritations and snot.

"In 1947, Partisan Review printed an essay, “Writers and Madness,” by one of its editors, William Barrett, claiming that the modern writer was by definition an “estranged neurotic,” because the difficulty of being authentic in a false-faced world forced him to go deeper and deeper into the unconscious, thus pushing him toward madness: “The game is to go as close as possible without crossing over.” Many did cross over, he added darkly.

Not everyone agreed that writers were mental cases, but a number of psychoanalysts did, and their loudest spokesman was Edmund Bergler, a Viennese émigré who in the forties and fifties put forth what is probably the most confident theory of writer’s block ever advanced. First of all, he coined the term. (Formerly, people had spoken of “creative inhibition” or the like.) Second, he proclaimed its cause: oral masochism, entrapment in rage over the milk-denying pre-Oedipal mother. Starved before, the writer chose to become starved again—that is, blocked. Bergler claimed to have treated more than forty writers, with a hundred-per-cent success rate. That didn’t mean that the writers became like other people. “I have never seen a ‘normal’ writer,” Bergler reported. Even if their work was going well, this was often “entirely surrounded by neuroticism in private life”—squalid love affairs, homosexuality, etc. They had recompense, however: “the megalomaniac pleasure of creation . . . produces a type of elation which cannot be compared with that experienced by other mortals” (italics his)."

-JOAN ACOCELLA
New Yorker Issue of 2004-06-14 and 21

Gaston Bachelard

2007-02-01T14:53:00.000-08:00

"Ideas are invented only as correctives to the past. Through repeated rectification of this kind one may hope to disengage an idea that is valid."

Saint-Expuréry

2007-01-30T11:20:00.000-08:00

"To love is not to look at one another but to look together in the same direction."

Pamuk

2007-01-26T15:56:00.000-08:00

"I am now going to speak of the meaning of that weight: that weight is what a person creates when he shuts himself up in a room and sits down at a table or retires to a corner to express his thoughts—that is, the weight of literature."

~ORHAN PAMUK New Yorker Issue of 2006-12-25 and 2007-01-01

I haven't had much to say here~

However, I've been trying to catalogue some of my dreams here- at this blog- which I will try to post to, once or twice a week.
http://blog.myspace.com/epithymy

Next week- some discussion of books read, including Sylvia Beach.

colbert

2007-01-23T12:37:00.000-08:00

The Arcades Project Walter Benjamin

Phantasmagoria is the intentional correlate of immediate experience. M3a, 4

Experience is the outcome of work; immediate experience is the phantasmagoria of the idler. M1a,3

If you would like more pictures of passages: http://www.santm.com/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=7380&g2_page=2

and more: http://www.parisbestlodge.com/passages.html

and a little more:
http://paris.contexttravel.com/static/passages.php?sess=ct&PHPSESSID=15a34471cda15533ae8fda95efd

choiseul

2007-01-19T16:14:00.000-08:00

The Arcades Project Walter Benjamin

Boredom began to be experienced in epidemic proportions during the 1840's. Lamartine is said to be the first to have given expression to the malady. It plays a role in a little story about the famous comic Deburau. A distinguished Paris neurologist was consulted one day by a patient whom he had not seen before. The patient complained of the typical illness of the times: weariness of life, deep depressions, boredom. "There's nothing wrong with you," said the doctor after a thorough examination. "Just try to relax-find something to entertain you. Go see Deburau some evening and life will look different to you." "Ah, dear sir," answered the patient, "I am Dedrau." D3a, 4

vivienne

2007-01-18T16:33:00.000-08:00

The Arcades Project Walter Benjamin

The father of Surrealism was Dada; its mother was an arcade. Dada, when the two first met, was already old. At the end of 1919, Aragon and Breton, out of antipathy to Montparnasse and Montmarte, transferred the site of their meeting with friends to a café in the Passage de l'Opéra. Construction of the Boulevard Haussman brought about the demise of the Passage de l'Opéra. Louis Aragon devoted 135 pages to this arcade; in the sum of three digits rides the number nine- the number of muses who bestowed their gifts on the newborn Surrealism. C1, 3

verdeau

2007-01-17T16:15:00.000-08:00

The Arcades Project Walter Benjamin

Arcades are houses or passages having no outside-like the dream. L1a, 1

The street conducts the flâneur into a vanished time. For him, every street is precipitous. It leads downward--if not to the mythical mothers, then into a past that can be all the more spellbinding because it is not his own, not private. Nevertheless, it always remains the time of a childhood. But why that of the life he has lived? In the asphalt over which he passes, his steps awaken a surprising resonance. The gaslight that streams down on the paving stones throws an equivocal light on this double ground. M1, 2

panoramas

2007-01-16T16:42:00.000-08:00

From The Arcades Project Walter Benjamin

The interest if the panorama is in seeing the true city- the city indoors. What stands within the windowless house is the true. Morever, the arcade, too, is a windowless house. The windows that look down on it are like loges from which one gazes into its interior, but one cannot see out these windows to anything outside. (what is true has no windows; nowhere does the true look out to the universe.) Q2a, 7

incarnadine

2007-01-12T10:46:00.000-08:00

My internal question for today: Do assassins get issued 1099's?

I like W. He would be someone I would go to dinner with and get into a lot of debates about literature and writing. Or maybe I should just shut up and listen to him. I don't know if he is real or made up. I have imagined a few "friends" in my life, I have notebooks filled with the fragmented details of their lives. I wonder if I imagined a lover if I would also have to imagine our fights. Because it would be wholly unrealistic for me to be in a romantic relationship with someone without having fights, or least have debates; it would be completely uncharacterstic of me for this not to happen. Let's just say I have an incarnadine temper.

discordant

2007-01-10T15:10:00.000-08:00

My internal question for today: Should I write a novel just for the hell of it? But what genre? Maybe I'll write a character-driven, faux-memoir in witty, discordant aphorisms with concurrent timelines as an extended metaphor for cladistic taximetrics. Or maybe I should write a "how to" book: "How to Avoid Marriage".

Why, do you ask, would I write a novel, since I do not care about publishing it nor do I care if anyone reads it? Well, I read this interview with author, Caitlin Kiernan, and I came across this line about her writing experience: "It was like having to spend every day sitting in front of a mirror, vivisecting my own brain." I thought to myself, "Hell, I do that everyday. If I wrote a novel, at least I would feel as though I had something to show for it." It would be parallel to getting a B.A. degreee for all the hours of sitting in a classroom letting someone dictate about what is worth knowing.

Ingurgitate

2007-01-08T09:51:00.000-08:00

My mind restlessly ingurgitates library books faster than I can check them out.

My internal question for today: Why is it when one is described as prolific, it is considered a good thing?

Perhaps the secret of great writers is a love which flings opens the doors to let thoughts and feelings rush in.

http://www.powells.com/review/2007_01_08

books read for 2006

2006-12-31T18:19:00.000-08:00

Some people post their favourite music or movies for the year. I can only post the books I've read from 1/1/2006-12/31/2006, cover to cover. Next year, I hope to be a nicer person to have read ten more books than this year. ~Tschüs

* = a friend made me read it
# = a writer or about writer who has committed suicide (that I know)

1. Across the Acheron -Monique Wittig

2. The Math Gene -Keith Devlin

3. Isabelle: the Life of Isabelle Eberhardt -Annette Kobak

4. A Chance Meeting -Rachel Cohen

5. The Immense Journey -Loren Eiseley

6. The Dispossessed -Ursula LeGuin

7. The Death and Death of Great American Cities -Jane Jacobs

8. What am I Doing Here? -Bruce Chatwin

9. Ludwig Wittgenstein: A memoir -Norman Malcom

10. Madame Bovary -Gustave Flaubert (trans. Paul de Man)

11.Three Women (Alma Mahler-Werfel, Gertrude Stein, Lous Andres-Salome) -Walter Sorell

12. The Road to Santiago -Kathryn Harrison

13. Fin de Siècle Vienna -Carl Schorske

14. Gathering Moss: A Natrual & Cultural History of Mosses -Robin Wall Kimmerer

15. # Moscow Diary -Walter Benjamin

16. # The Disinherited: The Life of Gérard de Nerval -Benn Sowerby

17. The Urban Ideal: conversations with Paolo Soleri

18. City Life: Urban Expectation in a New World -Witold Rybczynski

19. *Passage -Connie Willis

20. Color: A Natural History of the Palette -Victoria Finlay

21. The Flâneur -Edmund White

22. # The World of Yesterday -Stefan Zweig

23. Sade my Neighbor -Pierre Klossowski

24. California Forests and Woodlands: A Natural History -Verra R. Johnston

25. Oakland: A History -G.A. Cummings & E.S. Pladwell

26. Waiting for Godot -Samuel Beckett

27. # Insatiability -Stanislaw I. Witkiewicz

28. My Lives -Edmund White

29. *Bellwether -Connie Willis

30. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers -Mary Roach

31. Nausea -Jean-Paul Sartre

32. Tête –à Tête -Hazel Rowley

33. # Shadows of the Sun: The Diaries of Harry Crosby ed. Edward Germain

34. Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder -Mark Nelson & Sarah Bayliss

35. # Freud's Vienna and other Essays -Bruno Bettelheim

36. # The Painted Bird -Jerzy Kosinski

37. Blue Angel -Francine Prose

38. Faust & Yakov Pasynkov -Ivan Turgenev

39. The Portrait of Mr. W.H. -Oscar Wilde

40. Justine -Lawrence Durrell

41. The Great Gatsby -F. Scott Fitzgerald

42. The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century -Peter Watson

43. Blue of Noon -Georges Bataille

44. Shakespeare and Company -Sylvia Beach

45. #A Room of One's Own -Virginia Woolf

46. The Great Pianists -Harold Schonberg

47. Curious Naturalists -Niko Tinbergen

ataraxy

2006-12-26T15:38:00.000-08:00

Quick notes on feelings:

The past has past. I can't complain, nor would I want to. I drank three pots of pu-erh on Christmas Eve. and read the biography of Weldon Kees. I felt calm; this is the way I hope always get to spend my free time: books and tea (or an amaretto sour). I sincerely hope that all those who I have loved are loved now. I wish them all moments of joy.

A quick link of an article on Weldon Kees-
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/articles/050704crat_atlarge?050704crat_atlarge

kisses~

more LA scenes

2006-12-26T09:26:00.000-08:00

LA scenes

2006-12-22T12:07:00.000-08:00

esurient

2006-12-14T13:57:00.000-08:00

"The great naturalist, Fritz Müller- who was the first to describe the scent scales- mentions how, on his journeys in Brazil, he often carried a Paplio Grayi with him, just for the purpose of sniffing its scent when the mood took him." - Niko Tinbergen Curious Naturalists

"Ulysses, like everything else of Joyce's, was written entirely by hand. He used blunt black pencils- he found the ones he wanted at Smith's in Paris-and pencils of different colors to distinguish the parts he was working on. Fountain pens he didn't understand at all. They bewildered him. Once I found him struggling to fill one, covering himself with ink as he did so. Sylvia Beach Shakespeare and Company

Quicknotes on the books I finished reading this week:

The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I read it before when I was young. Now after reading it again, I am convinced I should read it at least once every other year. As I was reading, I would come across an amazing line that I would want to write down, but I just couldn't stop reading. Nothing I have read exposes the farce of the American dream as well as this novel. Material desires hiding the gaping emptiness of a life not examined.
I finished up the novel while I was at Bourbon & Branch in SF, a faux speakeasy-era bar with expensive, but good-looking cocktails; I had two. A few things I learned: Fitzgerald was an alcoholic, but he never wrote drunk, he was an amazingly sober writer and it shows in his prose. He was born in Minnesota; a Mid-Westerner transplanted to the East Coast; like Gatsby. And like Gatsby, Fitzgerald fell in love with a socialite (Zelda) who rebuffed his initial marriage proposal. He wrote his first novel, which became a success, he made some money, and he got to marry the girl; who ended up going insane and was confined to a mental institution. Nothing like love to drive you mad.

Speaking of mad, I also read The Blue of Noon, by Georges Bataille. Talk about a crazy novel, leave to Georges to leave me with my mouth open, thinking, "I can't believe someone wrote that." My head spun reading this novel of drunkenness and despair; written in 1935, all around, Europe falls into pieces and the characters lose themselves in grotesque debauchery and perversity.

I also read The Modern Mind, by Peter Watson. A dash into the great-breaking ideas that affected and transformed the 19th-20th Centuries. There's some decent reviews of the book here. I agree with most of it. It is a good book to get started on developing a foundation of historical understanding for the last 100+ years. Watson's analyses on novels were succinct and inspired, so much that I added another half dozen to read, plus I read The Great Gatsby again. I developed a mini-crush on this Watson fellow, even though he's older than my father. I imagined all the books he must have read, all the mental calculations it took to connect it together in this massive book; and it fulfilled my esurient need for understanding how the parts fit together. It could have plodded along, but Watson uses his journalistic skill to keep it an engaging read.

Blue

2006-12-13T16:13:00.000-08:00

"My life was following an increasingly crooked path. I used to go to various places for drinks, walk around aimlessly, and finally take a taxi home. It was then, in the depths of the taxi that I could think of Dirty and burst out sobbing. I no longer even felt any pain, or the least anxiety; inside my head, I was aware of nothing but absolute stupidity. It was like a state of perpetual childishness. I was shocked by the madness enacted by my wild state of mind whenever I wanted to tempt fate, and I recalled the irony and courage I had shown; and, of all that, the one thing left was the feeling that I was some kind of idiot, extremely touching perhaps, but in any care ludicrous. " Georges Bataille Blue of Noon